What if comfort is making us fragile? /// FOLLOW

Episode 013: What if comfort is making us fragile?

What if comfort is shaping us more than we realize?

In this episode of the FOLLOW podcast, we explore the connection between comfort, spiritual formation, and resilience—and why following Jesus sometimes means choosing discomfort on purpose.

We live in a world designed to remove friction. That isn’t necessarily bad. But when comfort becomes one of our highest values, it begins to form us. Practices like fasting, Sabbath, silence, solitude, and confession can train us to resist that pull and build a faith that is ready when life gets hard.

Because resilience usually isn’t built in the crisis. The crisis reveals what was built before it.

Following Jesus means rearranging our lives around what he said is true—and sometimes that means choosing discomfort now so we can stand firm when difficulty comes.

Meet your hosts, Eric Parks and Steve Carter

Eric Parks

Eric is an Executive Pastor at Plum Creek Church in Castle Rock, Colorado, who cares deeply about helping people rehearse the way of Jesus in everyday life—and holds firm as a Denver Broncos fan, no matter how often Steve brings up the Bears.

Steve Carter

Steve is the Lead Pastor at Christ Church in Oak Brook, Illinois, offering a thoughtful and honest voice to the deeper work of formation and calling—and remains a devoted Chicago Bears fan, even with Eric representing Broncos country.

Explore all of FOLLOW

We’re all following something—habits, expectations, ambition—but Jesus offers a different way. A way marked by love, presence, trust, and a life that actually leads somewhere good. Not perfectly, but increasingly, we begin to shape our lives around his.

We believe that if Jesus is right—about God, about life, about the soul—then is only makes sense to rearrange your life around what he says is true.

Follow isn’t a program to complete or a path to master, but a way of life centered on Jesus. A way of living that takes shape over time through a steady rearrangement of our lives—our priorities, our rhythms, and the things we trust most.

Links

Follow: https://www.followtheway.church/

Plum...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Whatever it is that gets the most attention from you is what's discipling you. You are being formed all the time. And if you look at your primary ideology, you can begin to see pretty clearly how we're being formed. But listen, we live in a culture where comfort is king. If comfort is the primary value, if that's the thing we think about the most subconsciously or consciously, it is discipling us. In this life, you will have trouble. Jesus promises this. Nobody becomes resilient during the crisis. And crisis will come. It will. See, the crisis actually reveals what you built before it. Welcome to the follow podcast, which is built around one core conviction. If Jesus was right about God, about life, about the human soul, then it makes sense to rearrange our lives around what he said is true. And that's what we're exploring together. What Jesus said, why it's true, and how to actually rearrange our lives around it. A few years ago, I had a friend who introduced me to honestly a word I didn't know. It was Masogee. And the concept's really, really simple, but what this friend of mine would do, which at the time I was, I thought it was I thought it was kind of strange. He would go on these insane backpacking trips, like deep into the woods, and only with a bow. And he would track, I don't even know what kind of animal he was tracking. I'm not a hunter, so I don't really know how it all works. But he would track down for hours, days, literally days. He would track down these animals and as he describes it, sit for hours in a tree stand camping out in the middle of nowhere, 40 miles, 50 miles from his car, knowing that if he were to get one of these big animals, he was gonna have to get it back to his car. And it sounded literally like miserable. And so I asked him, I was like, buddy, this sounds miserable. This legitimately sounds like torture. And he said, Well, yeah, that's the point. Because I I take a Masogee, something that is exceedingly hard, almost impossible, and I do it just because it's hard. And I thought to myself, that's what we're missing in our culture. I think I was listening to a podcast actually, someone, and I don't know that they said it quite this way, but maybe one of the least resilient generations ever. And I think they were trying to make a point. I I I do not believe that to be true. Um, and in fact, I think one of the things we can fall prey to as we get older is uh we look around and we'll say this the those young people, those young people, they are absolutely not resilient. Like they're lazy. But but but I just need to say every generation in recorded history has actually done that. They say that the one behind them is soft. It it's uh actually there's research, psychologists called this kids these days affect, which do you do you not just love that? Kids these days affect. I love it when a scientist just uses normal words instead of making up a phrase that then I have to memorize. Kids these days affect. And that's where we look back and we go, well, man, my generation or the generation before me, they were so resilient in this generation. And so I I want to be careful because that's just fundamentally not true. Uh, and I know what we say is, well, yeah, but look back in time, and I was thinking about my grandmother's generation and that she uh she went through a two world wars, a depression, raised eight children, and it's easy to look at people's lives, and uh you you will it's easy to say, oh, they're resilient. But a lot of what looks like resilience from a distance was actually suppression, and so I want to be careful because my great-grandmother's generation, why yes, they were great, and they went through some of the hardest times. And is Tom Brokaw right? It was the greatest generation, possibly. But I also know in my great in my great-grandmother's generation, my grandmother's generation, there were staggering rates of alcoholism, right? And untreated trauma, shell shock, uh abuse nobody named, men who never spoke after the war ever. So enduring is not the same thing as being well, it just isn't the same thing, and that's not what we're talking about. Um because the reality is there is a generation that didn't bounce back better, they just didn't have vocabulary for what they were going through. There weren't exits, so uh there was no way for them to describe or any spaces for them to describe what they were going through. So I want to be careful when we talk about resiliency that we're not too quick to pan the current culture and that we're not too quick to praise the previous, but instead, I think to have an honest conversation about what is resiliency and why is it important to faith? Because oftentimes around Plum Creek, our church, we talk about creating disciples that are resilient, that they're resilient, and so what does that look like? Um, well, I will say this with confidence that while this may not be the least resilient generation or culture of all time, because I don't think that's true. I can say this, I do believe that we are the most comfortable people in history, and and and that is pretty easy to document, right? That that we are the most comfortable people in the history of the world. We have engineered discomfort or been able to engineer discomfort out of our lives. And he made the comment to me, he said, Dad, like a hundred years ago, this place was one of the most dangerous places on earth. And I said, Well, what do you mean? He goes, Dad, like you would come up here in a covered wagon and if snow hit, it was so formidable, and now it's a resort. You come here to play. And I thought, it's so true that we have been able to engineer discomfort out of so much of our lives. What used to take months to get across an ocean now takes hours. The same with getting across the country. We are not only not separated by uh space, we're unseparated by time. We can literally pick up a phone and almost anywhere in the world communicate with someone seeing their face, right? We have engineered discomfort through technology and other things pretty much out of our lives. And I think because of this, we we may have engineered at least an element that is necessary for resiliency. The the other thing that I think is true is I I read I read an article not too long ago about what the what the author called um let me see here, what did they call it? Uh willful neglect. That sounds terrible, but Gen X, my generation, they were talking about latchkey kids. And and even beyond just latchkey kids, when I grew up, most of my life was ruled by free play. I just played. We just went out as kids, right? We would uh solve our own problems and uh we would settle our own disputes and we might get punched in the face and or we might get kicked or we would figure it out. This is just that's how it that's how it was. And you didn't get bored. If you got hurt, you didn't go home. I mean, unless your arm was falling off, right? You just played. And this was resilience training. In retrospect, when you look back, this was actually resilience training, even if nobody designed it for generations. This is how we were, right? We we had discomfort in our lives, and you know, this willful neglect, as the author called it, um, was resilience training. Now, I'm not suggesting that because we free played that my generation um somehow turned out better because let's just be honest, my generation carries high divorce and addiction and cynicism and those all those are all real things. But what I am saying is that um willful neglect did build an independence and it left a mark. And that is true with both discomfort and and these the this willful neglect that we experienced. And and we've for the most part engineered most of those things out of our world. And and that leads me to something that's really important. If we really are trying to become resilient followers of Jesus, it comes back to the thing I was talking about up front, this whole idea of Masogi. And that is this that um in order to be fully developed, we may have to engineer some discomfort back into our lives. Does that make sense? Like we might have to do hard things willingly, whether that's training for a marathon, uh forcing myself uh into situations that are trying. I I just think about it, even when it comes to how quickly we move on from people and jobs. Isn't it isn't our culture sort of marked by how quickly we can cancel things? And isn't that sort of because comfort is discipling us? Now let me say this before you turn the radio off. Whatever it is that gets the most attention from you is what's discipling you. We've we've talked about this on one of the earlier episodes. Like you are being formed all the time. You're being formed all the time. And if you look at your primary ideology, like you can begin to see pretty clearly how we're being formed. But listen, we live in a culture where comfort is king, where being comfortable is important. We talk about sheet count and uh mattress and goodnight sleeps and um what the shoes feel like on your feet. And and I'm not suggesting those things are bad. But what I am saying is that if comfort is the primary value, if that's the thing we think about the most subconsciously or consciously, it is discipling us. And I would make the case that for most of us it has it is this it is a discipleship mechanism, and that is why something like a Masogi is really important, where we choose, right? We choose to do hard things that we would other night otherwise not have to do. How many relationships have people walked away from that if they would have leaned in, they might have saved it? I don't know the answer to it, but I think this idea that we choose to do hard things, we choose to lean in. This is a resistance training. And think about it for a minute. Some of you celebrate Lent, the Lenten season. I mean, really, this is the celebration of the fast. You know, it's a 40-day journey to Easter. What is fasting? Is not fasting a masogee where you voluntarily feel hunger, right? Where you could pick up a literally pick up your phone and door dash something to you to quelch the discomfort of hunger. And instead, as a spiritual practice, we begin to engage in discomfort. And with fasting in particular, it is so that our body learns that God, not food, is your life. Think about Sabbath, practicing Sabbath, voluntarily losing productivity in a culture that says, You are what you make, you are your productivity. Is that not a form of Masogi where we give up something? Silence and solitude, voluntarily sitting in boredom that a phone could kill. You you can do do you know this is a fun fact. I heard John Oberg say this. There was no word for boredom in the Greek because these they knew what to do with their mind. We don't, and so we go to our phone and instantly begin. Go to a go to a waiting room and just look around for fun and watch people just scroll. We cannot sit with ourselves, and so isn't silence and solitude sitting in this boredom, right? Isn't that a form of masogee? Confession? Voluntarily feeling exposure that you try to avoid, like voluntarily saying, This is what I did wrong when you don't have to, isn't that a form of discomfort? And and I I say this is so important, and you say, Well, why? Well, first, because in this life you will have trouble. Jesus promises this. Um and this is what I've learned. Nobody come becomes resilient during the crisis, and crisis will come. It will see the crisis actually reveals what you built before it. I I think um this is why I think Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with hearing and then doing, right? That the practices are how you pour footing before the weather turns. Prayer builds a history with God. You can draw on Sabbath, it breaks your dependence on your own output. Community means the storm never finds you alone. You don't rise to the occasion, and you gotta hear this. You do not rise to the occasion, you actually fail to your preparation. That's why we do this stuff. We prepare. And um I want to say, like this this discipleship idea, um, it actually isn't Japanese at all. I mean, you see it in the early church, the early Christians, these practices that we have practiced for years, for millennia. This idea to be uncomfortable in order to be formed into the people that when the storm comes, when the rain comes, we are able to stand in it. Right now, you're in the storm, right? And and this isn't your training season, this is probably your your learning season. So um choosing difficulty is for the comfortable stretch of the road. So choose like when you think about it, so the unchosen difficulty, the unchosen difficulty that will come, it will find you resilient because we've trained in these moments when we didn't have to, right? You don't fast your way through a breakdown, you get help, you lean on people, but that's why we do what we do, so that when the time comes, we will be resilient. So there's so many ways to take next steps in in the Christian faith and to begin to choose to choose to be uncomfortable. And uh maybe it's this week. Maybe you fast a meal as you begin to dip your toe into this practice of discomfort. Um, maybe you do practice silence and solitude by just putting your phone down for a a few hours stretch. Um whatever you you choose to do, this is the work that we're up to these days with follow. It's to lay out practices that we can engage in that make us resilient followers of Jesus by practicing some of what would feel uncomfortable in moments that we could have chosen being comfortable. These grace-filled practices that train us in ways that direct effort could never do. And so those of you that continue to take steps towards understanding who Jesus is and what he means, I remind you of the phrase we always say, listen, if Jesus was right about God, life, and the soul, then it would make sense that we would rearrange, and this is what we mean to rearrange your life around these things that he said was true, to rearrange your life in such a way that we push back against the culture that says being comfortable is the most important thing to be. And instead, in seasons, we step into discomfort intentionally. Well, that's gonna do it for today. If something landed for you in this conversation, don't just let it sit. Take it with you, carry it into your week, talk about it with someone, let it do something in you. And if you want to go deeper, click on the link in the show notes. We'll be back soon with more. But until then, keep following.