Jeremy L. Berg

By Skye Jethani

Comfort is a good thing, especially for those enduring pain or grief. Throughout the Bible God’s people are promised his supernatural comfort amid their sufferings, and the Holy Spirit himself is called the “Comforter.” While Scripture affirms the value of comfort, it also makes clear that we require resistance, striving, pain, and suffering in order to grow in godliness. Simply put, comfort has its place but comfort alone does not produce maturity. This is a well-known truth outside the bounds of Christianity as well.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, looks at the harmful effects of over-protecting kids and young adults. Beyond creating environments that keep kids physically safe, Lukianoff and Haidt show how our culture now sees any discomfort as a mortal threat. Lukianoff says, “A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

Just as kids raised in sterile environments develop more allergies, kids protected from any challenging ideas, people, and circumstances develop into fragile adults allergic to life in a diverse society. Comfort retards their development and resiliency. They become delicate “snowflakes.”

The same thing is true for our spiritual formation as Christians. If we are not challenged, stretched, and put in difficult circumstances, our faith will atrophy. Instead, as James said, we ought to accept trials with joy because they are the means by which God grows us. Dallas Willard said it this way:

“So it is absolutely essential to our growth into the ‘mind’ of Jesus that we accept the ‘trials’ of ordinary existence as the place where we are to experience and find the reign of God-with-us as actual reality. We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to ‘catastrophize’ and declare the ‘end of the world’ when things happen. We are to see every event as an occasion in which the competence and faithfulness of God will be confirmed to us.” In other words, comfort is never the goal for a Christian. Rather, God is our goal and while we may thank him in our comfort he is no less present and active in our suffering.