Boxes

We’ve managed to put our lives into boxes. We live in boxes – we put fences in our yard, roll our windows up in our cars, and wish for a corner office with a view of the people that we don’t want to interact with. We box ourselves in with our “safe group” of friends, and we start to box in the way we think and feel about the world and the way it works. Heaven forbid we ever have to get out of our boxes, or worse, have someone come in and try to rip it open a bit.

So let’s rip open some boxes.

We live in boxes because it feels secure, safe, comfortable, familiar. And maybe it is. But is that really how you want to live? Who has ever loved that didn’t take a risk? And who has ever found what they’re passionate for without leaving comfort and failing a few (or ton of) times? Spoiler alert: the answer to these seemingly rhetorical questions is “nobody”. Comfort is perhaps the most misunderstood concept for my generation, and maybe even this culture. Because comfort is not sitting on a couch all day doing nothing. There’s a reason you feel crummy after spending all day lounging around (been there, done that). Now I think comfort can still be found on that same couch, but maybe after a long day’s work or a well-deserved break from it all. And hopefully you’re sharing that couch with someone you love or even someone you’re just meeting.

You see, I don’t want to overcorrect and somehow say that being comfortable is evil or something. Sometimes in the thick of it all, the best thing to do is seek solitude and quiet – to crawl into a box (maybe even sometimes literally). It’s necessary and natural in a world that is pulling us in a million different directions to the point that a few of us start to tear at the seams because that’s not good for anything either.

But the fact remains that too many of us have crawled into some kind of comfort box a long time ago, and we haven’t come out. We haven’t changed the way we think, we’ve closed ourselves off, and we doubt the workings of a world that we’re not really a part of anymore.

To box ourselves in is to box in our potential. To box in our potential is doubt ourselves and therefore what God can do with our lives. And to doubt what God can do in our lives is to doubt that God can empower us to do “anything through He that strengthens us” [Philippians 4:13], and to doubt that is to put God in a box.

But there’s nothing convenient about putting God in a box; He doesn’t ever fit, and if He did we can’t seem to get Him to stay there. So perhaps if our lives are indeed as boxed in as they seem, we should start unpacking from the top. We should start to unpack God from the boxes we’ve shoved Him into and allow Him to reveal Himself as the INFINITE being that He is. Because Paul said it pretty well when he stated in Ephesians 3 that we cannot know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge – in other words, we’ll try, but we can’t even imagine how big, how good, or how perfect our God is. That’s something you can’t box up. And if that God is in your life, your life isn’t exactly something to keep to yourself, either.