Burning Incense
Imagine you experienced a reeling personal failure. You were fired from your job, your boyfriend said you were too clingy and broke up with you, your child retreats from you and your controlling clutches. What is your response? Do you desperately try to get back that which you lost? Do you call your best friend for personal reassurance? Do you frantically start cleaning your house? Or do you veg in front of “The Great British Bake Off” with store-bought baked goods?
Your response to failure reveals your idol: power, approval, control, or comfort. We all desire and seek power, approval, control, and comfort, and build shrines to them. When the scorching sun of failure burns, we run to our favorite shrine and light incense. In a land of abundance, it is not surprising that we so often run to the shrine dedicated to our god, comfort?
Everywhere we look, people are promoting and selling comfort. Had a bad day? Drink a glass of wine. Need a pick-me-up? Treat yourself to a massage. Need to unwind? Try yoga. Bars are nearly as numerous as churches, and on an equal standing with beauty parlors. Leading writers are endorsing self-care. They claim that in order to properly love others we have to first love ourselves, by making sure we experience some level of personal comfort each day. Furthermore, they advise us to eliminate those things which threaten our comfort so that we can “live lightly, freely, courageously, surrounded only by what brings joy, simplicity, and beauty.”1
In other words, if your friends make you feel uncomfortable, find new ones. If your job is too strenuous or unpleasant, quit. If your marriage requires too much concerted effort, leave. Instead, surround yourself with supportive, positive people and things which make you feel attractive and help you reach your goals.2
Do whatever it takes to secure your personal comfort.
Spiraling Downward
Now, it is not inherently wrong to eat expensive food, get a massage, sit in a warm house. Indeed, our earthly comforts are a blessing. They are a demonstration of God’s common grace. But when we trust in the world to give us comfort instead of God, we will only hurt ourselves and others.3 When we use created things to do what only the Creator can, we end up contorting and misusing them, making that which is good a means to sin.
Consider this: after a failed final exam you comfort yourself with a piece of cake and a glass of wine. The sugar and alcohol take the edge off your failures, leaving you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. But hardly has the food passed from throat to stomach than the effect is eliminated. In an attempt to get that good feeling back, you repeat the procedure (light more incense). Only now one piece of cake and one glass of wine is not enough. You look around for something more: a cookie, potato chips, a milk shake, a mixed drink. The effect of these, too, is soon forgotten. And the cycle repeats. The food and drink themselves are not wicked or bad. Rather, when we use them as comfort, we succeed only in committing sins of drunkenness and gluttony with them.
We see this pattern repeated whenever we turn to created things to comfort. The first time someone reads a pornographic romance novel, the dopamine rush overshadows any thought of discomfort. But the more you read, the more you need to read (and do) in order to get that same rush again. And words, created by God to glorify him and bless neighbors, become means to satiate our own twisted desire to enter someone else’s bedroom when our own is stark.
The same is true of sex. When it is your sources of comfort, the first time is a thrill, the next time less, and next less still. Soon you find you need it more, or differently, or with someone else, in order to feel the same level of comfort. The good gift is now only a means to an end. And the pattern holds with shopping, going to the beauty parlor, binge watching Netflix, and so on.
Whenever we turn to earthly things to give us comfort in the face of failure, we will always want more and more and more. And in pursuit of more, we will twist and control and misuse. “ Our hearts are ever seeking a comfort this world doesn’t seem to offer. We become obsessed with finding it . . . and with doing anything to keep it.”4 In other words, despite its temporary nature, we come to depend on earthly comfort as a means of escape from the pain of failure, rejection—reality.
But we cannot keep lighting incense to this god. We will only end up with burning eyes and smoke in our lungs. The only way to deal with the pain of failure is to take it to God, asking him to give us the comfort we so desperately need. For “comfort isn’t the problem. God made us needy—created us to need him. He is the one our hearts truly need when we self-soothe with food, shopping, control, sex, isolation, and the like.”5
Comforted by the Comforter
God is our only true source of comfort. He is the only comfort that never runs dry or grows stale. The more we run to him for comfort, the more we will find—and the more lasting. We will find that he is the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Cor. 1:3–5, English Standard Version). Because Christ suffered for us—living a life of discomfort— we who believe in him are given comfort in abundance (Heb. 4:15). Indeed, the Holy Spirit resides with us forever. And this same Spirit is called the Comforter (John 14:26). When we turn to God for comfort, we will never lack.
Until we realize this, we will always be chasing something less. We will be stuck in a dark shrine, blinded by smoke. As J. I. Packer once wrote, “Our conceits and apprehensions of comfort are but dreams, till we attain some true feeling of God’ s love to us in Christ Jesus [poured] and shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto us: that once gained, it fills our hearts with joy unspeakable and glorious, and makes us more than conquerors.”6 In other words, until we truly know God’ s love for us, we will be continually disappointed with the comforts offered by this world. We will continually use those good gifts from God to give us what only he can give.
Knowing this, our only real solution for failure is not more incense. The solution is to run—by his strength and through his grace—to him who will give lasting comfort. Find our comfort in him. Then, in gratitude, enjoy the good things he has given us in creation. Not as sources if comfort, but as blessings that direct our gaze back to him.
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” (Isa. 55:1–2)
1. Shauna Niequist, Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 185.
2. Leon Logothetis, “Keeping Good Company: Why You Should Surround Yourself with Good People,” huffpost.com, March 6, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kkeeping-good-company-why-youshould-surround-yourself-with-goodpeople_b_6816468, accessed December 4, 2019.
3. Erin Straza, Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits That Bind You (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017).
4. Straza, Comfort Detox.
5. Straza, Comfort Detox.
6. J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973).
Mrs. Elisabeth Bloechl a member of Orthodox Presbyterian Church Hammond, is a house cleaner and aspiring writer in Hammond, WI.