This month we’ve taken a look at a few aspects of discipline – remembering to keep God first and making sure our thinking is accurate. These are things we often choose to ignore. But if we want to grow in our relationship with Christ, they are things we need to consider.

Pour yourself a cup of tea and join me today as we wrap up this series with a challenging post by my friend and author, Jennifer Slattery.

Somewhere between my teen years and now, I’ve developed a tendency to cling tightly to my comfort zone. To gravitate toward the easy and comfortable, and many times I can easily justify it.

Oh, I’d rather not go there. Not tonight. I’m too busy. Or too tired. Or … Maybe I should pray about this some more.

Oh, I’d rather not initiate conversation with that person. She probably wants to be left alone anyway.

But then, every once in a while, when asking me to do something particularly difficult, God will remind me

The other night, while contemplating something particularly uncomfortable I sensed God calling me to, a verse came to mind:

This in turn made me think of some of the races I ran in the past, and the intense workouts I willingly underwent in order to prepare for them. I trained in heat, cold, wind, rain, up hills and down hills. No one forced me to get going when my muscles ached. No one pushed me on when my lungs started to burn or blisters formed on my heels.

I did all these things willingly, because I knew what each mile was accomplishing in me. I knew I was growing stronger each day I laced up my shoes, and throughout every workout, I kept one thing in mind—the finish line.

And yet, each of those races lasted at most an hour and a half, and many more were done in under thirty minutes. Hour after hour I trained for something so fleeting.

Do I respond the same when it comes to growing those things in me that will be of benefit for eternity? Those things like perseverance, humility, and self-sacrifice?

As I considered this the other night in light of what God was calling me to do, I thought, “What would you say to Ashley, (my daughter) if she were facing this same thing?”

Suddenly, everything flipped, and I began to see God’s loving hand. Like an attentive parent, He wasn’t calling me to the easy or the comfortable. He was calling me to that which would make me grow.

Because that’s what love does. In every encounter and interaction, in every act of service,

Isn’t that a humbling and awe-inspiring thought?

Novelist and speaker Jennifer Slattery has a passion for helping women discover, embrace, and live out who they are in Christ. As the founder of Wholly Loved Ministries, she and her team put on events at partnering churches designed to help women rest in their true worth and live with maximum impact. She writes devotions for Internet Café Devotions, Christian living articles for Crosswalk, and edits for Firefly, a Southern fiction imprint with Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas. When not writing, reading, or editing, Jennifer loves going on mall dates with her adult daughter and coffee dates with her hilariously fun husband.