Guest blogger Rich Wilson explores the impact of finding comfort.

Even though I follow a God who promises an ever-present counsellor, the Holy Spirit, to comfort me, I have also developed coping mechanisms that bring comfort, at least for short while.
Quick fix comforts include switching on the telly, screen time with my phone or tablet, desktop research, play or work. It may also involve eating or drinking, going to the gym or meeting a friend. Many of these comforts are blessings…so what’s the problem? The issue is how my response to the desire for comfort affects my discipleship. Where I consistently go for comfort could well have the greatest impact upon who I am becoming.  

In Our Head…We can comfort ourselves by playing out an alternative reality. We may choose to be bolder or less inhibited; we may fantasize about being more popular, more appreciated, more desirable or wealthy. In our head we can be in full control. It seems comfort eating and socialising was an option in Jesus’ culture and there are many accounts of him eating and socialising. In these stories Jesus seems to be thinking and acting on heaven’s agenda in a way that is natural and instinctive, energising and not tiring, as though he was already comforted and now able to share that comfort with others.

Solitude
‘But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.’ (Luke 5:16) If Jesus modelled and embraced the practice of solitude, how much more do we need to embrace it in our culture of constant status updates, relentless advertising and ever expanding sources of news and information? Solitude is perhaps the greatest discipleship pathway we have and is also the most comforting; there no hint of consumerism and requires self-leadership to embrace it.

Solitude reveals yearnings and longings; it can reveal awkward and uncomfortable truths about our self worth, security or sense of significance. Solitude reveals secrets and perspectives that God is longing for us to hear and is just waiting for our full attention.  We are then free to interact with things/others in a different way, and we aren’t consciously or subconsciously looking for those things/people to feed our core needs and desires because our core has already been comforted.

It could be said that all discipleship takes place outside our ‘comfort zone’. It is a place of risk, adventure, pain, suffering, uncertainty, faith, hope and love. Let’s embrace these wild and untamed spaces just as Jesus embraced the wilderness.

Rich Wilson is National Team Leader for Fusion – fuelling the fires of a national student movement www.fusion.uk.com

During a recent trip to Trondheim, Norway, I was dazzled by this view. Mesmerised by the calm beauty, I was daily teased and tempted to embrace it and risk the enabling of MY life-speed to be altered and re-configured.

The duty of days and diary commitments, the panic of ideas half-done and aspirations unrealised, the often enriching and at times challenging activity of living and giving creates a pace which is hard to suspend...even for a moment. 

Slow down? Think? Not think? Enjoy? Rest? For how long? What else could I be doing? These were the questions that scrambled my mind as if entertaining strangers...but soon I realised the unfamiliar pattern of stillness should not be a distant and rarely visited option but rather, an absolute necessity. Why? Well, within the stillness is not an absence but a presence. We are able to refresh the touch and awareness of our creator, soak in the wonder of such a designer and find opportunity to deepen our sense of habitation and purpose.  I now want more, not less, moments of intentional reflection and meditation - so maybe my life speed has already become slightly re-configured! My scarcity of space does have a solution, and that solution is me!

from guest writer Sue Rinaldi who blogs at Apocalipstick

Apparently we are not breathing deep enough! Yes it took a 30 year study to confirm something we already know. Singers have always been aware that to sing well you need to breathe well and we are well versed in the emphasis on 'breathing in' as a way of feeling enlarged and rejuvenated....aka the breath of life!

Trendhunter.com, a great resource for catching trend waves and observing future patterns, reveals that breathing is the focus of a current trend and an indicator of that trend is found in popular music. An examination of all popular songs over the last 30+ years entitled Breathe reveals that over 70 percent of those songs have been released in the last 10 years. This is "indicative of feeling a type of communal suffocation. The 21st century has brought an increase in pressures on people and when there are increased pressures on us, physical and mental, we don’t breathe as we should. We use shallow breathing and when we do that we don’t relieve stress. Bottom line: If we don’t take time to breathe, we can’t be creative, we can’t solve problems, and we can’t be truly innovative".

Great how God is originally revealed as the breath of life and as we see in Genesis, 'cosmically creative'. PLUS the Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruach which means 'air in motion' or 'breath'! 

So, breathe deep and know where that breath began, and expect creativity and innovation to be by-products of deep breathing. I love it when futuristic messengers tell the old, old story!!