A Single Yes

The Quote I Nodded At

I once had a mentor tell me that a comfort zone is where things go to die.

Including you.

At the time, I nodded.

It sounded right. It sounded tough. It sounded like something that belonged on a bumper sticker, an inspirational poster, or the front of a T-shirt worn by somebody who wakes up at 4:00 a.m. and wants everyone to know about it.

I understood the words, but I did not yet comprehend the warning.

There are truths we hear long before we are ready to recognize them in our own lives. We agree with them intellectually because they sound wise, but we have not lived enough of the pattern to see what they are describing. Then years pass. Seasons change. We look backward, and the sentence that once sounded like a slogan suddenly reads like a map.

Until recently, I had never fully understood how much of my life could be traced through seasons of comfort and discomfort.

There were seasons when the crops came in, money flowed, friendships multiplied, my body felt strong, and the future appeared predictable. There were other seasons when the ground felt dry, provision seemed scarce, relationships were trimmed, workouts hurt, plans failed, and the version of life I had learned to control stopped cooperating.

There were times I was building.

There were times I was coasting.

There were times I was recovering.

There were times I called stagnation peace because I did not want to admit that I had become afraid to move.

Scripture says there is a season for every activity under heaven. It includes specific rhythms of seven years in Israel’s life, seven years of abundance and famine in Joseph’s story, and a seventy-year period of exile in Jeremiah. Those passages do not give us a universal formula that every personal life repeats on a fixed schedule. But they do reveal a God who understands seasons, limits, preparation, harvest, loss, rest, judgment, renewal, and return.

Life moves in seasons.

The question is not whether the season feels comfortable.

The question is whether I am still obedient inside it.

Comfort Is Not the Enemy

I need to make an important distinction before turning discomfort into another idol.

Comfort is not automatically evil.

Rest is a gift.

Safety can be a blessing.

Predictability can give a family stability.

A good harvest is meant to be received with gratitude.

The Bible does not command us to manufacture pain, remain in chaos, or prove our faith by making every decision unnecessarily difficult. Jesus withdrew. God established Sabbath. Paul learned contentment. A home can be peaceful without becoming spiritually dead.

The problem is not that comfort exists.

The problem begins when comfort becomes more authoritative than God.

A comfort zone becomes dangerous when I would rather protect it than obey Him. It becomes a grave when I build my identity inside what I can control and refuse to leave after the assignment has changed. It becomes decay when yesterday’s harvest convinces me I no longer need to plant, train, pray, risk, listen, or move.

Comfort can be a place to recover.

It cannot be the god that decides whether I say yes.

Discomfort is not automatically holy either. Some discomfort is the consequence of wisdom ignored. Some is produced by addiction, impulsiveness, ego, dishonesty, or trying to force a door God never opened. Constant chaos can break a person down. Burnout is not proof of obedience. Pain does not become purposeful merely because I endured it.

The goal is not to chase discomfort.

The goal is to become so surrendered that discomfort no longer gets the final vote.

James does not tell believers to pretend trials feel good. James says to consider them joy because the testing of faith can produce perseverance, and perseverance can mature us. Romans follows a similar progression: suffering produces perseverance, perseverance forms character, and character produces hope. The pain is not praised for being pain. God is praised because pain does not get to waste what has been placed in His hands.

That is different from motivational toughness.

The gospel does not merely tell me to become harder.

It teaches me to become faithful.

Before I Said Yes, Someone Else Got Uncomfortable

One of the biggest examples of this pattern began in 2013, before Danielle and I met.

It actually began with somebody else getting uncomfortable first.

My friend Nicole grew up one town over from me in Wyoming. She had recently returned from a personal-development seminar and was actively building a fitness and nutrition company. At the time, I was helping her build websites and marketing around the business.

We grabbed lunch to review the project.

At least that was what I thought the lunch was about.

Somewhere between talking about websites, offers, marketing, and whatever else was on the agenda, Nicole began pitching me on traveling with her to the next seminar in Orlando, Florida.

If you knew Nicole, asking somebody to travel across the country for an event was not especially uncomfortable for her. She could make a large invitation sound like the most normal suggestion in the world.

But she was making it to somebody who could be stubborn, prideful, and sarcastic.

I could have made fun of the event.

I could have made fun of her enthusiasm.

I could have demanded every detail, researched every possible downside, and used skepticism to disguise fear. I could have decided it sounded too strange, too expensive, too inconvenient, or too far outside the version of myself I already knew how to be.

Instead, after the pitch, I heard myself say, “Sure. Count me in.”

Then, right before we stood up, I added something that sounds ridiculous when I retell it now.

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll meet my future wife there.”

Cue the wide-eyed emoji.

At the time, it was probably half joke, half possibility, and half something I did not yet have language to explain. Yes, that is three halves. That is how little sense the statement made.

But the sentence left my mouth before the story existed.

I Had No Good Reason to Say No

I was already entering a new season.

I had completed my degrees. I had moved back to my hometown and escaped what I sometimes called my favorite jail cell in my college town.

I had started a company in the land-management sector and was generating decent revenue by building mineral-right ownership reports. That is another Field Note for another day.

I had money.

I had time.

I had a reason to leave the three feet of snow sitting on Wyoming, even if only temporarily.

There was no serious obligation preventing me from going. I simply had to decide whether I was willing to enter a room, an experience, and a group of people I did not understand.

I remember thinking that if the event was terrible or became too strange, I could always disappear to a beach bar until the return flight.

That was my backup plan: say yes to growth, but reserve the right to flee to a drink near the ocean.

It was not yet mature faith. It was not a heroic act. I was not crossing a desert with nothing but a staff and a promise. I was buying a plane ticket to Florida.

But obedience is often hidden inside ordinary movement.

The choice does not always look important while we are making it.

Sometimes it looks like lunch.

Sometimes it sounds like, “Sure. Count me in.”

Sometimes the doorway to an entirely different life appears so normal that we can walk past it without realizing what is waiting on the other side.

Saying yes to Nicole became the third most important yes of my life. The first was saying yes to Christ, which had happened a few months before the Florida trip. The second would be saying yes to Danielle a few weeks after meeting her.

Nicole’s invitation sits third because it carried me to the place where the next yes became possible.

I could not see any of that from the restaurant in Wyoming.

All I could see was the next step.

The Ticket Lady on Facebook

This is where the story begins to sound less like a testimony and more like the opening of a scam documentary.

Nicole told me she would connect me with a woman on Facebook who could help organize my event ticket.

So I messaged a stranger online.

We communicated back and forth in February 2013. Eventually, she told me to send a certain amount through PayPal and assured me that I would have a ticket.

That was it.

No official receipt.

No confirmation number.

No clean little email telling me where to stand, what to bring, or how to prove I had paid.

Just money sent over the internet to a woman I had never met.

Sounds like a scam.

I remember thinking it. I may have said it out loud.

Then, a few days later, I saw that this random woman was now in London at another event.

I texted Nicole.

“Hey, I think this lady just took all my money and went overseas.”

The facts were not helping. She had my money. I had no ticket. I had no confirmation. She had crossed an ocean. I did not have a warm feeling about the transaction.

But I went anyway. In faith of a seat at the event.

That part matters.

I did not receive the certainty I wanted before boarding the flight. The evidence available to me did not make the story feel safer. I traveled across the country with questions still unresolved.

Faith is not pretending questions do not exist.

Sometimes faith is refusing to let an unanswered question cancel the next faithful step.

“We Don’t Have a Ticket for Waldon Fenster”

The night of registration arrived.

We walked down to the event and stood in line. When I reached the registration table, the person looked through the records and delivered the sentence I had expected and hoped not to hear.

“We don’t have a ticket for Waldon Fenster.”

I asked them to check again.

They checked again.

Still no ticket.

Every suspicious thought I had entertained suddenly stood up and announced that it had been right all along.

I found Nicole.

“What the heck?”

She called the ticket lady. I was standing beside her, and the phone was on speaker.

Nicole explained that we were at registration and that they could not find a ticket for Waldon.

The woman on the phone asked, “What is Waldon’s first name, and who did he buy the ticket from?”

Nicole and I made eye contact.

I let out the kind of laugh a person makes when disbelief has nowhere else to go.

Nicole said, “Waldon is his first name, and he bought the ticket from you.”

The woman immediately said, “Don’t tell him I said that.”

Nicole replied, “Too late. You’re on speaker.”

What a start to the event.

Needless to say, the ticket lady was real. She came to registration, introduced herself as Danielle, and helped find my ticket.

The woman I thought had taken my money and escaped to London became the woman I would marry.

God has a sense of humor.

He also has an extraordinary ability to hide the significance of a person inside an ordinary introduction.

At that moment, Danielle was not “my future wife” to me. She was the woman who had finally produced evidence that I had not been scammed.

But the story had begun.

One Man, Seven Women, and Margaritaville

That night, after registration, I somehow ended up in a van with seven women.

The only one I knew was Nicole. Danielle’s newly familiar face was there, along with several of her friends, and we were all packed together on our way to Margaritaville for dinner.

Have you ever felt as though you stood out a little?

I was the only man at the table. They were repeat attendees who understood the event, the language, the personality systems, the activities, and the culture surrounding all of it. They were talking in a dialect I did not speak.

I had no idea what was going on.

So I did what I have done in many uncomfortable rooms.

I smiled.

I nodded.

I inserted a joke whenever possible.

I made fun of myself before anyone else could do it for me.

Humor has often been one of the tools I use to cross a distance I do not yet know how to name. It can lower defenses, including my own. It can create connection without requiring me to admit how out of place I feel.

At some point during dinner, I began feeling that I was supposed to pay for the meal.

I had been raised to believe that being a gentleman meant paying for dinner when I was out with women. The problem was that I had just met nearly everyone at the table. This was not a date. It was not a family dinner. It was seven women and the Wyoming guy who had barely located his ticket.

I remember the internal conversation.

“God, I do not know these people.”

The conviction did not leave.

Eventually, I went to the restroom, handed the waiter my card, and asked him to bring the receipt to me when the meal was finished.

The evening continued. People talked. We laughed. Drinks arrived. Shots appeared. The room became louder and the group more relaxed.

Then the waiter came back to the table and made an announcement.

“Ladies, this guy just paid for all of dinner. But before I close it out, would anybody like anything else or dessert?”

For one brief moment, I considered whether punching a waiter in the throat was compatible with being a gentleman.

He had taken a quiet act and turned it into an open invitation to expand the bill.

The women were gracious. They thanked me. Then they used more language about my personality, what the act meant, and what it revealed. I still understood only part of the conversation.

But Danielle and her friend Jennifer pulled me aside. They thanked me and bought me another shot.

That small act of reciprocity mattered.

It showed me that generosity did not have to create distance or obligation. It gave me permission to lower my guard. Maybe we had more in common than I had assumed. Maybe the room was not asking me to become somebody else. Maybe I could remain myself while becoming more open.

Discomfort had not disappeared.

Connection had simply become more important than escaping it.

Row One, Seat One

The entire weekend was uncomfortable.

I sat in a room with roughly a thousand people from all over the world, learning unfamiliar skills, ideas, mindsets, and language during the day. At night, we went out, celebrated, talked, and sometimes stayed out until three in the morning. Then we got back in line so we could earn row one, seat one for the next day.

The schedule did not make sense.

The energy did not make sense.

The people seemed to operate with a level of openness and intensity that was different from the world I knew.

Yet somewhere inside the discomfort, I was changing.

Not because every idea in the room was automatically true. Not because a seminar had replaced Scripture. Not because intensity itself produces transformation. I was changing because I had allowed myself to enter an environment where my assumptions could be questioned.

Sometimes we call our resistance discernment when it is really pride.

Sometimes we call our isolation independence when it is really fear.

Sometimes we mock what we have not experienced because contempt feels safer than curiosity.

I did not have to surrender my judgment to remain teachable.

I simply had to stop treating unfamiliarity as proof that something had no value.

That lesson would follow me into marriage, business, faith, fatherhood, healing, failure, recovery, and every other arena in which God has required me to become more than the version of myself that first entered the room.

The Ticket Scammer from Chicago

On the final day of the event, I rushed out during lunch, grabbed food, and claimed a table.

I had a plan I was pretending was not a plan.

I was selfishly hoping Danielle would find me—or that I could find her—because I wanted to talk with her again.

I felt magnetized toward learning more about the ticket scammer from Chicago.

We did have lunch together. We also had dinner that night. Other people were around, but the room had changed for me. I was no longer merely tolerating an unfamiliar crowd. I was paying attention to one person inside it.

As dinner ended, reality began closing in.

The next day, I was flying back to Wyoming.

Danielle was headed to Disney to spend the day riding rides.

The weekend would end. The temporary courage created by the event would lose its environment. If I wanted the conversation to continue, I had to make that desire visible.

Time to get uncomfortable again.

I asked for her number under the guise of wanting to connect during the week and talk more about future events.

Smooth, right?

I was basically disguising interest as networking.

After the event, I sent a single message.

“It was great meeting you. I look forward to talking with you more.”

Then nothing happened.

For a few days, the message sat there unanswered while I began wondering whether I had imagined the connection.

Discomfort is easy when the room is loud and everyone around you is taking risks.

It becomes more revealing in the silence afterward.

There was no applause for sending the message. No music. No seminar facilitator telling me I had broken through a limiting belief. There was simply a phone that was not producing the response I wanted.

Eventually, Danielle replied.

One message became more messages. More messages became longer conversations. Then she mailed me a book she thought I would enjoy: The Happiness Advantage.

The book gave us a reason for our first official phone call.

The call was supposed to be a thank-you and a quick catch-up.

It lasted four hours.

Four Hours in the Driveway

I took the call while sitting in my truck in the driveway because I wanted privacy and quiet.

For four hours, Danielle asked questions.

And more questions.

And questions after those questions.

It felt a little like an interrogation, which was not an entirely unfamiliar setting for me.

I managed to ask a few questions of my own, but Danielle was an experienced question dodger. She had a gift for getting me to answer while revealing considerably less about herself. I did not fully understand what she was doing until about a year later.

But the conversation was different from anything I had experienced.

It was deep without feeling forced. It moved easily. We talked about life, experience, ideas, possibilities, and the future. The discomfort of being known began colliding with the desire to be understood.

That is one of the strangest parts of real connection.

We want somebody to see us, but being seen removes the protection of performance. We want intimacy, but intimacy requires the surrender of hiding. We want covenant, but covenant asks us to become honest enough that another person can love the real one standing there.

When the call finally ended, I sat in the truck with a certainty that was completely unreasonable by ordinary measurements.

I said to myself, “I am going to marry that girl.”

Then I walked into the house.

My stepbrother Codey was sitting on the couch. He could tell I was on cloud nine. He said something like, “Must have been a good call.”

I told him, “I just talked to my future wife.”

I had met Danielle once.

We had spent one long weekend in overlapping groups.

We had completed one four-hour phone call.

From the outside, my conclusion looked premature.

From inside the story, it felt like recognition.

The Flowers That Looked Like Stalking

That call led to conversations multiple times a day.

We talked deeply. We dreamed about a future. We kept discovering connections beneath backgrounds that looked completely different from the outside.

After about a week, I decided to send Danielle flowers.

There was only one problem.

I did not have her address.

Then I remembered the envelope in which she had mailed The Happiness Advantage. I found the return label, copied the address, and sent the flowers.

I thought it was thoughtful.

Danielle thought it was alarming.

She had no idea how I had found her address and briefly wondered whether the guy from Wyoming had begun stalking her.

In fairness, “I saved the envelope so I could extract your address without asking” does sound considerably less romantic when spoken aloud.

But that awkward moment did not end the connection.

It became part of the story.

That matters because we often imagine that a God-written story will feel polished while it is happening. We expect each moment to arrive with clarity, perfect timing, cinematic music, and behavior that never requires explanation.

Real stories are messier.

They contain misunderstood gestures, delayed messages, missing tickets, strange dinners, awkward requests, mixed motives, and two people trying to decide whether what they sense can be trusted.

God’s hand does not remove our humanity from the story.

His grace works through it.

Danielle’s Uncomfortable Yes

I was not the only person taking risks.

Eventually, Danielle could see where the relationship was heading from her side. She wanted confirmation that the connection we were building through phones and messages could survive the physical world.

So she made her own uncomfortable decision.

She told me she was going to fly into Denver for the weekend.

My heart skipped and then began beating faster than it did when I ran a marathon.

A half marathon, but that detail does not help the sentence.

I drove to Denver and picked her up in a snowstorm. The weekend itself is a story for another time. But the very first night, at dinner, Danielle made one of the boldest declarations I had ever heard.

She said, “I want you to be my last first kiss.”

That sentence removed the fence.

There was no comfortable place to sit between yes and no. I could not pretend we were casually exploring a vague possibility. I heard her statement as a line in the ground.

Either I was in this, or I was not.

I called her bluff because I had been ready for the statement since our first phone call.

We kissed.

The story moved.

We did not care how uncomfortable our decision made family, friends, or anyone trying to calculate the relationship from the outside. We were not ignoring counsel because we were addicted to rebellion. We were not trying to prove that speed was spiritual. We were two people from different worlds and different backgrounds who believed God had brought us together.

The relationship felt less like something we had constructed and more like something we had recognized.

From Hello to “I Do” in 58 Days

Danielle and I met.

Fifty-eight days later, we married.

I have described it as an arranged marriage, but not in the ordinary sense. Our families did not negotiate it. An institution did not assign us to one another. Nobody removed our agency or consent.

It felt arranged by God.

Before Nicole invited me to Florida, both Danielle and I had already been moving through seasons of growth. God had been preparing two lives before either life knew the other existed. Then a chain of ordinary and uncomfortable decisions placed us in the same registration line.

Nicole said yes to her own growth.

She said yes to inviting me.

I said yes to traveling.

I said yes to sending money to a stranger.

Danielle said yes to helping with the ticket.

I said yes to staying when I felt out of place.

I said yes to paying for dinner.

I said yes to asking for her number.

She said yes to sending the book.

We both said yes to four-hour conversations.

She said yes to flying into a snowstorm.

I said yes to her last first kiss.

Finally, we said yes to each other and sealed our covenant.

One large yes rarely stands alone. It is usually supported by a trail of smaller acts of courage that seemed almost insignificant when they occurred.

That does not make 58 days a formula.

I am not telling people to meet a stranger at a seminar and marry two months later. Speed does not prove God’s direction. Intensity does not eliminate the need for truth, prayer, counsel, character, consent, safety, wisdom, and clarity. Another couple may need months or years to reach a faithful decision. Our timeline is testimony, not instruction.

The lesson is not “rush.”

The lesson is “obey.”

Our wedding did not prove we had completed the work of marriage. It began the covenant in which that work would occur. Saying “I do” in 58 days did not make every future day easy. It committed us to keep choosing one another through the seasons that followed.

The miracle was not only that God brought us together quickly.

The deeper miracle is that He has continued forming us together slowly.

Two People Prepared in Separate Places

Looking back, I can see why the story felt arranged.

Danielle and I came from different worlds. We had different histories, different experiences, different personalities, different wounds, different strengths, and different ways of moving through a room.

On paper, some of those differences could have looked like incompatibility.

In covenant, they became fit.

She carried strengths I needed. I carried strengths she needed. She could ask the question behind the answer. I could see possibility and move toward it. She could recognize what I was avoiding. I could create momentum when fear wanted to hold the future still.

That fit did not mean we never hurt one another. It did not mean every difference immediately became beautiful. It did not mean love removed the need for repentance, repair, patience, forgiveness, boundaries, or growth.

It meant God could use the very differences that created discomfort to shape us beyond what either of us could become alone.

Ecclesiastes says two are better than one because they can help one another when one falls. It also says a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. That passage is broader than marriage, but its picture has become meaningful to us: two lives with Christ at the center, not two incomplete people demanding that the other become God.

Marriage is not the elimination of discomfort.

It is a covenant strong enough to tell the truth inside it.

Thirteen Years Later

Now, thirteen years later, our seventh child is on the way.

There have been incredible highs and painful lows. There have been seasons of abundance and seasons of loss. Seasons when we felt connected and seasons when life tried to pull our attention in a hundred directions. Seasons when I led well and seasons when my decisions brought pain into the home I was supposed to protect.

There have been consequences, healing, laughter, tears, moves, businesses, risks, prayers, battles, births, recoveries, and versions of ourselves that had to die so the covenant could keep living.

Through all of it, I can honestly say Danielle loves me unconditionally.

That does not mean she approves of everything I have ever done. Unconditional love is not unlimited permission. It does not erase truth or consequences. It does not call harm good. It stays committed to the person while refusing to pretend that destructive choices are harmless.

Her love has been steady enough to confront me and strong enough to remain.

I look forward to the next thirteen years, the next thirty-three, and the next fifty-three of a love story that began with a single yes.

But even that sentence needs one more layer of truth.

The story did not begin with my yes alone.

It began with God’s faithfulness before either of us could see the design. It moved through Nicole’s willingness to invite, Danielle’s willingness to help, my willingness to go, and a thousand decisions after the wedding that no one could make on our behalf.

Our marriage was born through a chain of uncomfortable yeses.

It has survived through a covenant that keeps saying yes after the feeling changes.

The Two States Beneath the Seasons

When I look across my life, I can see the two states my mentor was describing.

In a healthy comfort state, I rest. I receive. I enjoy the harvest produced by prior obedience. I build rhythm and give my family stability. I remember that God is good even when I am not fighting for survival.

But when I remain there too long, rest can become passivity. Gratitude can become entitlement. Stability can become resistance. The mental, emotional, physical, relational, financial, and spiritual muscles I once trained can begin to atrophy because nothing is asking them to carry weight.

In a healthy discomfort state, pressure exposes what I actually believe. A hard workout reveals whether I have trained. A financial drought reveals what I worship. A trimmed relationship reveals whether I value alignment more than company. A new assignment reveals whether I trust God more than competence. A difficult conversation reveals whether I want intimacy or merely the appearance of peace.

But discomfort has its own danger. If I treat chaos as home, I can become addicted to crisis. I can confuse adrenaline with purpose and exhaustion with sacrifice. I can keep creating fires because being needed in an emergency feels more meaningful than building a quiet, healthy life.

Constant comfort breeds fragility.

Constant discomfort produces breakdown.

Faithfulness learns how to receive rest without becoming ruled by it and how to endure pressure without becoming addicted to it.

The mature question is not, “How uncomfortable can I make myself?”

It is, “What is God asking me to do in this season?”

The Best Thing Outside My Comfort Zone

For years, I thought “getting comfortable being uncomfortable” meant becoming tough enough to handle pain.

There is some truth in that. Perseverance matters. Discipline matters. Courage matters. A person who collapses at the first sign of resistance will never discover what sustained obedience can form.

But toughness is not the deepest lesson of this story.

The best thing waiting outside my comfort zone was not a stronger mindset.

It was not a business opportunity.

It was not a seminar breakthrough.

It was not proof that I could travel alone, sit in an unfamiliar room, or buy dinner for strangers.

The best thing waiting outside my comfort zone was Danielle.

That changes the meaning of discomfort.

Sometimes discomfort is not merely the price of growth.

It is the distance between the life you know and the person you are being prepared to love.

Nicole could not see seven children when she invited me to Florida.

I could not see thirteen years of marriage when I sent money through PayPal.

Danielle could not see our covenant when she searched for my ticket.

The waiter could not see a future family when he announced that I had paid for dinner.

Codey could not see the wedding when I walked in from the truck and announced that I had spoken to my future wife.

None of us could see the full weight of the yes.

God did not require us to.

He asked us to be faithful with the next part.

One Yes Can Hold Generations

That lunch invitation eventually became a marriage.

That marriage became a family.

That family became a legacy we are still building.

One yes can hold more than the person saying it knows.

This does not mean every impulse carries destiny. It does not mean every invitation should be accepted or every risk spiritualized. Wisdom still matters. Discernment still matters. Safety still matters. Counsel still matters. Scripture still matters. A feeling of urgency is not the voice of God merely because it makes the heart beat faster.

But there are moments when we already know the next faithful step and keep asking for more information because information feels safer than obedience.

We say we are waiting for confirmation when we are really waiting for discomfort to disappear.

It may not disappear.

Courage is not the absence of discomfort.

It is the refusal to let discomfort become lord.

Joshua was told to be strong and courageous because God would be with him wherever he went. The promise was not that the land contained no battles. The promise was presence inside movement.

Jesus said discipleship requires denying ourselves, taking up the cross daily, and following Him. The cross is not a self-improvement device. It is the death of self-rule. It is the surrender of the idea that I get to follow only when the path preserves the version of life I prefer.

That is why the call is not “seek pain.”

The call is “follow Me.”

Sometimes He leads beside quiet waters.

Sometimes He leads into a room of a thousand strangers.

Sometimes He leads through a registration line where your name cannot be found.

Sometimes He leads to a table where you are the only man.

Sometimes He leads into a snowstorm to pick up the woman who will become your wife.

The scenery changes.

The Shepherd does not.

Do Not Build a House Where God Built a Rest Stop

There are comforts in my life today that I once prayed to receive.

A wife who loves me.

Children whose lives fill our home.

Work I am gifted to do.

Stories I have been told to tell.

A faith that has survived things I once believed would destroy it.

The answer is not to despise those gifts in order to remain hungry. Gratitude is not complacency. I do not need to sabotage peace to prove I am still dangerous.

I need to remember what the comfort is for.

Rest should restore me for obedience.

Provision should increase my ability to serve.

Experience should make me more generous, not more closed.

Marriage should become a place where truth can live, not an excuse to stop pursuing the person I promised to love.

Faith should make me more willing to follow God, not more confident that I already know every route He will choose.

A comfort zone is not a coffin until I refuse to leave when God calls.

It can be a camp.

It can be a recovery room.

It can be a place to enjoy the harvest.

But I should never build a permanent house where God built a rest stop.

Your Uncomfortable Yes

There may be a yes in front of you today that looks too small to matter.

Make the call.

Send the message.

Tell the truth.

Accept the invitation.

Ask for help.

Apologize without defending yourself.

End the habit that keeps numbing the instruction.

Step into the room where you do not know the language.

Ask the question you have been disguising as networking.

Let another person see the part of you that performance has protected.

Do not choose the action simply because it is uncomfortable. Choose it because it is faithful.

Then release your demand to know what the yes will eventually hold.

I could not see 58 Days from that lunch table in Wyoming.

I could only see Orlando.

I could not see a marriage from the PayPal transaction.

I could only see an unresolved ticket.

I could not see thirteen years from the first four-hour call.

I could only hear a woman asking questions from the other end of the phone.

I could not see seven children when I drove into the Denver snowstorm.

I could only see Danielle waiting at the airport.

The future rarely arrives all at once.

God places it inside a sequence of faithful decisions and asks us to carry the next one.

Comfortable being uncomfortable does not mean I finally stop feeling the tension.

It means the tension no longer decides for me.

I say yes because God is trustworthy.

I move because He is present.

I love because Christ loved me first.

And sometimes, after years have passed, I look backward and discover that the uncomfortable step I nearly dismissed was carrying the life I had been asking God to give me.

Scripture for the Field

James 1:2–4

James tells believers to consider trials a cause for joy because tested faith produces perseverance, and perseverance matures the person who allows it to complete its work. The passage does not call pain pleasant. It calls the work God performs through tested faith valuable.

Romans 5:3–5

Paul traces suffering through perseverance and character into hope, grounding the process in God’s love poured into believers through the Holy Spirit.

Luke 9:23

Jesus calls His followers to deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow Him.

Prayer

Father,

Thank You for every season in which You have carried me, corrected me, rested me, stretched me, and refused to leave me unchanged.

Teach me to receive comfort as a gift without making it my god. Teach me to endure discomfort without worshiping pain, creating chaos, or confusing recklessness with faith. Give me discernment to know the difference between an impulse and an instruction, between burnout and sacrifice, between hiding and waiting, and between fear and wisdom.

Show me the next yes.

Give me courage to move before I can see everything the yes may hold. When I enter an unfamiliar room, remind me that Your presence is more dependable than my competence. When I face silence, uncertainty, rejection, or risk, keep my identity anchored in Christ rather than in the outcome.

Thank You for the people whose uncomfortable obedience opened doors in my life. Thank You for Nicole’s invitation. Thank You for Danielle’s courage, honesty, love, and covenant. Thank You for the family and legacy that grew from choices none of us could fully understand at the time.

Protect my marriage from complacency. Help me keep choosing the woman I promised to love. Let our differences continue forming us, our repentance keep repairing us, and our home testify that Your grace is stronger than every season we have survived.

Make me faithful in rest and faithful in pressure.

I do not ask to become comfortable with every circumstance. I ask to become secure in You wherever obedience leads.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen.