What Did You Come to Find?

What Did You Come to Find? Rethinking Comfort and Discipleship

There is a question worth sitting with today, one that cuts straight through the noise of daily life and lands somewhere uncomfortably close to the heart: What did you come to find?

It is the same question Jesus posed to the crowds who had been making their way out into the wilderness to hear John the Baptist preach. In Matthew 11:7-10, Jesus turns to the people and essentially asks them to examine their own motivations. Did you go out there to see someone living in luxury, dressed in fine clothes, taking it easy? No. People like that are in kings' palaces. So what drew you out there? What were you actually looking for?

The question does not stay in the first century. It follows us right into the present moment, into every space where we gather to seek something greater than ourselves. And it deserves an honest answer.

The Difference Between Comfortable and Comforted

Here is a distinction worth holding onto: there is a significant difference between being comfortable and being comforted.

Jesus never promised his followers a life of ease. What he did promise was his presence, his peace, and his comfort in the midst of the hard places. Those are not the same thing as arranging life so that nothing ever challenges or disrupts us.

When Jesus spoke the Beatitudes, he said in Matthew 5:4 that those who mourn will be comforted. The promise is comfort for those who are in the midst of grief, not a guarantee that grief will never come. That is a subtle but important shift in how we understand what God offers us.

Comfort is a genuine and precious gift from God. It is just a poor foundation for discipleship.

The Jenga Tower of Faith

Think about the way faith is built over a lifetime. From childhood onward, people and experiences and absorbed assumptions all contribute to the structure of what we believe and how we practice it. Some of those blocks were placed there intentionally by people who loved us. Others were absorbed quietly, without much examination.

One of those blocks, for many people, is the idea that the purpose of spiritual community is to make them comfortable. Not just to comfort them in hard times, but to consistently meet their preferences, reflect their tastes, and affirm their expectations.

That block is worth pulling out and looking at carefully.

It is not that comfort is wrong. It is that when comfort becomes the standard by which we evaluate our spiritual lives, we have quietly placed ourselves at the center of something that was never meant to revolve around us.

When Things Do Not Suit Us

Here is the more pointed version of the question: What happens in you when what happens in your spiritual community does not suit you?

That is where the real examination begins. Because the honest answer for most of us reveals something. When the music is unfamiliar, when the message steps on our preferences, when the atmosphere feels different than what we expected, there is an immediate internal movement toward either resistance or retreat.

And the instinct is understandable. We live in a culture that has spent enormous energy trying to meet individual preferences. Advertising, entertainment, and technology have all trained us to expect that our tastes will be catered to. It is natural that those expectations would follow us into spaces of worship and community.

But what if that discomfort is not a problem to be solved? What if it is an invitation?

What if some of God's most important work in us happens in places we would never choose for ourselves?

The Fleas and the Barracks

One of the most striking illustrations of this principle comes from the life of Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch Christian who, along with her sister Betsy, was arrested by the Nazis during World War II for hiding Jewish people in their home. They were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, a place of almost unimaginable suffering.

In that barracks, stripped of every comfort, they had managed to smuggle in a Bible. They gathered women around them and taught the word of God. And many of those women came to faith in Jesus Christ in the middle of one of history's darkest places.

There was one detail that made all of it possible. The guards refused to enter their barracks because of a severe flea infestation. That infestation, which Betsy had encouraged Corrie to thank God for even as Corrie resisted the idea, was the very thing that gave them the freedom to teach and preach without interference.

The principle drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5, that we are called to give thanks in all circumstances, was not a comfortable teaching for two women living in a concentration camp. But it became the foundation of a ministry that would eventually reach millions of people around the world.

God did not cause their suffering. But he did not waste it either.

Surrender Over Preference

In Matthew 16:24-25, Jesus is direct about what it means to follow him. He says that anyone who wants to be his disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. He goes on to say that whoever tries to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it.

That is not the language of comfort-seeking. That is the language of surrender.

Discipleship asks us to loosen our grip on our preferences, our expectations, and our comfort, not because those things are evil, but because they can quietly become the thing we serve instead of the one we came to find.

So the question returns, and it is worth letting it linger: What did you come to find?

If the answer is something real, something true, something that transforms rather than merely affirms, then the invitation is to come with open hands. To trade expectations for expectancy. To welcome the discomfort that sometimes accompanies genuine encounter with the living God.

He is not in the king's palace, dressed in fine clothes, offering a life arranged for maximum ease. He is in the wilderness, in the barracks, in the middle of the night when nothing else helps, saying: I am here. I will comfort you. Now let me change you.