A friend of mine has a cat named Reuben who was bought a nice comfy cat bed.  The only thing is, he prefers to sleep in his shoebox instead of his larger and more cozy bed.  Cats aren’t the only ones who are creatures of habit–human beings are too.  As someone who is very much a creature of habit, I can definitely relate to that problem.

The tendency to remain comfortable with the familiar is one of those conservative tendencies that is very widely present in humanity, even among people who don’t consider themselves very conservative.  Habits or cycles are hard to break–we become attached to our routines, because our minds are like ground that gets buried with deep ruts and tracks that it is hard to get out of, that form trails in our minds and lives that are the only tracks in the immense wilderness of life we know how to get around–even if we go to places we don’t like, they are they only places we know how to find.

As a graduate student in Engineering Management, I studied a lot of “progressive” management techniques that ended up being very Matthew 20 in approach–about leaders serving as examples, about efforts for change and improvement starting from the ground level employees and going up rather than being forced from the top down, and management being responsive to the motivations of workers rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach, or worse, not being interested in motivation at all.  It is frustrating to have academic knowledge of what one believes to be a better way but no ability to put it into practice.

Nor is this an isolated experience.  I have spent my life dealing with all kinds of deep ruts and bad cycles that I would like to break but don’t know how.  The fact that so many of them are interrelated makes its a difficult matter to wrestle with.  If they could be isolated and dealt with one by one it would be an easy thing to climb out of one shoebox at a time and into a better environment, but I lack the resources to deal with everything at once.  Nor do I suspect this is an uncommon problem.  There are connections in so many areas that we are often unaware of.

We were created in the image and likeness of God–we have many offices prepared for us with great responsibilities, and to fulfill them we have to step outside of the familiar not only for ourselves, but for all of humanity.  We have to blaze trails in the wilderness for others to follow, set up paths to make things easier on those who will follow in our footsteps.  Being a firstfruit is like being a pioneer, a trailblazer–that which survives the harsh elements and the lonely wilderness makes tracks on the ground for others to follow who will not have to be lost in the vast empty spaces.

If we are called to leave the shoebox, we have a noble and terrifying responsibility to blaze the trail through the wilderness to the promised land, to go down the road less traveled on, to take the narrow road rather than the wide path to destruction, and to show the way for others.  I suppose if someone has to do it, then it might as well be ourselves, right?  Sometimes the shoebox is just too comfortable, even if there is something much better being prepared for us if we will only step out of the comfort zone of the familiar routine.  But you can’t know until you step out.