The power of lukewarm.

How the status quo absorbs our faith and passions.

In January I went to Mexico for a week with some friends. This week of sun, sand and sea in the middle of dark, grey and cold Canadian winter was a sacred sabbath of sorts in my usually fast-paced life. I know it’s a highly privileged reality and received it as a deep gift to my body, mind and soul.

For over a year now I’ve been practicing cold plunges. I’m enjoying the benefits of resilience training as I engage in a willful embracing of discomfort as a teaching tool and an effective way of waking up my body, mind, and spirit with cold immersion. So, it seemed a relatively normal idea to make a cold plunge in my bathtub in Mexico. I thought the heat and cold extremes would be a kind of nordic spa of my own making. But I could not do it.

I don’t say those words with any kind of nuance. I simply could not make that bathtub cold. The coldest water from the taps of the gloriously warm country was lukewarm. And all the ice I could find (several rounds of several buckets) did NADA to change the temperature, even in the slightest. Every time I emptied a bucket of ice - it just disappeared, swallowed whole by the lukewarm temperature of the bath water. It was infuriatingly to perform, comical to witness and at the same time kind of incredible to experience. Ladies and gentleman, behold the power of LUKEWARM. I spent the rest of my days in that beautiful place praying and thinking through this modern parable - the power of lukewarm.

I’ve always considered lukewarm to be a sum zero of nothing. I thought the reason God spewed it out of his mouth in Revelation was simply because it wasn’t anything noteworthy. It wasn’t hot or cold. It was blah. It was yuck. It was, well, nothing of substance. I had long ago realized that comfort and wealth had a suction to it. I knew that upward mobility and prosperity theology fueled a trajectory of life that had a strong current to it. I knew that if I didn’t ‘do anything different’ or aim for something else, I would easily be pulled into the gravitational orbit of more and more comfort.

Years ago I had a dream where a bunch of spiders ate me whole (longer story for another time) all because I was infected with a sleepy spirit that kept me so comfortable that I couldn’t stand up or move to defend myself. Remember the whole movie premise of Wall-E, the Pixar film, where humans were on a spaceship and had not used their bodies for so long that they really couldn’t anymore? It was like that with a spiritual dimension. It had awakened me, all those years ago, to embracing discomfort as a Divine Invitation. It was shortly after that dream that I moved into a challenging neighbourhood where discomfort kept me awake and served to actively fight against the gravitational pull of the status quo. It worked. But it was hard. And it gets harder. Every time I try to challenge the comfort norm it seems to get more difficult to do.

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Every decision to divert from the status quo trajectory came with a load of questions that mostly followed these themes:

• Does God really require it? Isn’t it kind of old fashioned to think God wants us to live sacrificially?

• What about the kids? Do you want to damage your children because of your own need for challenge?

• Why make life harder than it is? Don’t we all struggle with the realities of life and the hardships of being human? Why make it more difficult?

• Is it wrong to have a comfortable life? Isn’t comfort a blessing?

And as I had these conversations with anyone related or in a similar situation to me things always seemed to get more personal…

• Are you saying I’m not living a godly life? Is my life wrong? Are you saying that my comfortable life is not ok?

Having these conversations and asking these questions can be their own version of embracing discomfort and the sheer volume of them can easily have us fade into the warm waters of ‘don’t stir the boat!’ Sometimes I wonder if it actually gets harder to challenge the status quo or if the repetitive daily questions it provokes just wears you down. In my experience it’s not the big ideological shifts that are hard to make, it’s the small, daily changes that require the most relentless resolve. I find myself wondering if it’s asking the questions that’s hard or having to have the same conversation repeatedly that is the real grind?

Asking these questions isn’t wrong. It really isn’t. I don’t think we should romanticize struggle, and even the idea that I have to struggle to embrace struggle is such a ridiculously privileged position it’s hard to give voice to it. And I’ve long since grown out of sacrifice over obedience as a spiritual discipline. But it should be said that obedience can still involve sacrifice. Generosity shouldn’t have to hurt to be real. I know that. And yet, there is something more. I must give voice to this real internal struggle and prophetic unction, because, well, lukewarm has power.

Much of what we dream as we think of living our best lives is not pushed back because of some glorious fight with dark forces but a simple inability to challenge the lukewarm reality of our cultural norm.

Because it’s hard to change or even challenge the stronghold of our own culture.

When I first started out in Christian ministry I wanted to be a missionary to a distant land. I think there was a part of me that understood to go somewhere else was to say ‘no’ to my dominant culture one time in a burn the bridge moment of decision. God shut those doors, over and over again. When I asked why I felt the Spirit inviting me to live my ‘no’ daily. I sensed a holy invitation to cultivate a counter-cultural life in the dominant culture I was in. This must be holy work because it feels impossible to do without Divine intervention.

To create an actual cold plunge the water temperature needs to be under 10 degrees Celsius (sorry, American friends - you’ll have to do your own math conversions!).

This is much harder to do than you might think. In the winter, when the weather is uncomfortably cold, it’s easy. Just fill up a tub and leave it outside overnight and tada - an ice plunge! But in the summer, it gets harder (in Mexico, it’s impossible without some kind of external power mechanism). Fill up a tub and leave it outside in a warm climate and without doing a single thing you’ve got lukewarm!! And this got me thinking about lukewarm living and the status quo. It seems to me that the older I get and the longer I live in a life that is comfortable, the harder it is to change it. And maybe the lesson is that if lukewarm is the dominant temperature of my climate (what runs out of my tap), then it’s almost impossible to change anything without a lot of effort. And the effort needs to be extreme and consistent.

My lukewarm attitude, lifestyle, spiritual life, and culture will absorb the prophetic power out of any message, prophetic inclination, passion, calling or impulse. There won’t even be a fight, not even a struggle. It’ll be swallowed whole by the power of lukewarm. As D.L. Moody put it, ‘Our greatest fear shouldn’t be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter.”

I don’t want to be judgy here but I have witnessed the aversion to discomfort being a key reason for church boards to spin the truth, potential missionaries choosing to stay put, truth tellers turning down the volume, conferences playing it safe, leaders not repenting, families not fostering, women not rising up, men not embracing their emotions, and the church not responding to the demands of Love. The greatest threat to our witness in these days is not external forces of darkness attacking, it’s the absorbing power of lukewarm to keep us busy with things that don’t matter.

Comfort is killing us.

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Maybe there’s a better set of questions to help us embark on an awakening journey of discomfort and take up the invitation to follow Christ who carries a cross and invites us to do the same:

• What does Love invite me to live? Where does Love lead me today?

• How can I make room to include others, different from me,  in my life, work, community, and church?

• Where is holy passion for what God’s Love compels me toward? Am I moving in the direction of those passions?

• How can struggle invite me to rely on God in a fresh way? Am I avoiding pain, or persecution or discomfort? Am I refusing/avoiding what I feel called to do because of the cost?

Maybe if we understood the dangerous power of lukewarm to absorb our passion and callings it would compel us to proactively fight against it? If we were alert to the dissonance of what we had hoped for and how we wanted to live compared with how we live now and why we continue to live that way, we might be provoked to make new decisions and discover new ways of faithful obedience?

My good friends had a longing to live differently for many years. But it was never the right time to leave a secure job, and depart from family and friends to trust God and take a huge risk. But one day a few years ago now, they did it anyway. They packed up their things and drove across borders to begin again. In obedience to an invitation, to follow a hunch and a holy longing, they reoriented their lives around pilgrimage, discovery and joyful abandon.

They gave the spiritual finger to the status quo. And it was hard. Really hard. It involved a lot of soul searching and lonely moments and detoxing a lifetime of being handed the ‘just because’ and ‘we’ve always done it this way’ and digging up the obligations and soul-ties and guilt, fear and shame that comes with these shifts.

They were dealing with their stuff and facing it head on. They moved out of comfort and into the extremes of heat and cold, which is the invitation when lukewarm is no longer an option. And as they moved into their divine invitation - freedom came.  Incremental at first and soon a small trickle, eventually culminating in a stream.

The stream leads them to loads of joy, adventure and longing, struggle and pain, and this beautiful truth that they are currently moving towards a different life. A full one. They are doing new things with a new found faith in the possibilities of living with less stuff but more love. They are not just thinking about how it could be or might be if only they could muster up the courage - they are living courageously.  It’s really beautiful to witness. And it’s infectious. It’s well, abundant. It’s full. And it’s the life that’s worth contending for.

I’m not suggesting this kind of life isn’t available in a suburban house with extra rooms filled with folks normally excluded, or with backyard tiny houses that host people struggling to survive the affordable housing crisis or established churches identifying girls at risk of trafficking and getting there first, or families with mini-vans and hearts that make room for one or two more! There are many, many ways of using our comforts to subvert dominant strongholds and fight for life in fullness.

I’m simply recommitting myself to rage against the lukewarm power of our comfortable culture! And I pray we will all awaken to the reality that the only thing we have to do to die comfortable, disconnected, empty and easy lives, is nothing.