From Coffins To Comfort—and Back Again

Last night, I spoke online with thirty 17- and 18-year-olds, sharing a talk about compassion and calling.

At one point, I stopped mid-sentence. What I had planned to say suddenly felt too neat, too rehearsed for the weight of the moment. So I tried to say something more honest. This is an attempt to do that more fully.

I was born in 1977 and raised in a conservative evangelical church. From early on, we were given a clear vision of discipleship—costly, purposeful, and directed outward.

We talked often about unreached people groups. There were maps on walls, statistics in talks, whole nations described in terms of access to the gospel. The world felt urgent. Unfinished. Our lives were meant to be caught up in that unfinished task.

We were also shaped by stories. Missionaries who left everything behind. People who travelled with their belongings packed in coffins, expecting never to return. Figures like David Brainerd—praying in the snow, coughing up blood—held up as models of devotion.

Those stories did something to us. They gave weight to the idea that following Jesus was not casual. Your life was not your own.

Alongside that, we were taught that what ultimately mattered was the saving of souls and personal holiness. That was the centre. And there is something deeply right in that. Lives matter. Eternity matters. Holiness matters.

But something was missing.

Part of what was missing, I think, was a fuller sense of what it means to be human before God—not just as agents of mission, but as creatures: embodied, limited, dependent, and sustained by grace.

We were not given much of a vision for how to be human and whole. How to live well 'east of Eden'—in a world marked by limits, loss, and ordinary time. There was little language for emotional health, for embodiment, for rest, for the slow work of becoming an integrated person.

We were taught how to spend our lives, but not always how to inhabit them.

Later, I moved in more charismatic spaces. The emphasis shifted, but the intensity remained.

We were “history makers.” A generation on the edge of change. We expected transformation—not eventually, but in our lifetime. Revival was near. Impact was measurable. Momentum was assumed.

Looking back, I think some of that confidence borrowed from a wider cultural story—the idea that things are always getting better. That history bends, more or less predictably, toward progress.

That story feels much harder to believe now.

We are living through ecological instability that is no longer theoretical. For many younger people, the future is not an open horizon but a narrowing one. Plans feel provisional. Hope is often threaded with anxiety.

That changes how calling is imagined. Not as a grand, unfolding arc, but as something more fragile. More immediate. Sometimes, harder to locate at all.

At the same time, many of those “history makers” are now in midlife. And the story did not unfold as simply as we expected.

I think of people I know—faithful, generous, and tired. Some burned out after years of unsustainable pace. Some quietly stepping back, not in failure but in honesty. Others rethinking what they were told to expect from God, from the church, from their own lives.

Part of the issue is this: we were never really given a theology that included limits.

Limits were often treated as problems to overcome rather than features of our creatureliness—places where dependence on God is not a failure, but the beginning of wisdom.

There was little language for boundaries. Self-care was easily dismissed. Mental health was often overlooked or spiritualised. We were formed for intensity, but not for endurance.

There was little permission to be ordinary. Little guidance on how to sustain a life of faith over decades rather than years.

In response, a necessary correction has emerged.

We are learning to speak about emotional health, about resilience, about sustainable rhythms. We are recognising, sometimes for the first time, that we are not the Messiah. That it is not only acceptable but good to live a faithful, ordinary life.

But corrections have their own gravity.

In pushing back against what was unhealthy, we can drift further than we intended. In rejecting pressure, we can lose purpose. In dismantling unhealthy ambition, we can end up suspicious of ambition altogether.

And yet something in us still knows that our lives are meant to be for something.

Not because we can secure outcomes or guarantee impact, but because we are drawn into what God is already doing in the world.

Rutger Bregman calls it moral ambition—the desire to use your life for what actually matters. In Christian language, we might call it kingdom or cruciform ambition.

Not about platform.

Not about recognition.

But about aligning our lives, in costly and concrete ways, with the purposes of God—seeking justice, loving mercy, and taking part, however small our part may be, in the renewal of all things.

Because the forces that shape us have not weakened. If anything, they have become more subtle.

Consumerism trains us to equate the good life with comfort. Individualism narrows our vision to the self. A risk-averse culture quietly persuades us that safety is wisdom.

And all of it works, slowly and effectively, to make our lives smaller.

The call of Jesus still interrupts that.

But the way forward is not a return to burnout, or to heroic fantasies that ignore our limits.

It is something quieter, and in some ways harder: a form of discipleship that is both courageous and sustainable.

Because our end—our telos—is not success, but Christlikeness.

“Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

The goal is not that we become impressive, but that we become like Jesus.

And that likeness has a shape.

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus… who made himself nothing… he humbled himself… even to death on a cross.”

The Christian life is, at its core, cruciform.

Shaped by self-giving love.

By humility.

By downward movement rather than upward striving.

This reframes everything.

Mission is no longer driven by pressure or heroic narratives, but by participation in the life of Christ. Compassion is not an optional extra, but what grows, slowly and visibly, in a life being reshaped by him.

We are not called to save the world. But we are called to bear witness to another Kingdom—to become communities that make that Kingdom a little more visible in the places we actually live.

That kind of witness is rarely dramatic. More often, it takes shape through shared practices—attention, repentance, generosity, hospitality—lived out together over time.

So perhaps the invitation now is this:

Resist the pull of comfort.

Resist the quiet shrinking of your life.

But also resist the pressure to be extraordinary.

Instead, give yourself to the slow work of becoming like Jesus.

Pay attention to your limits.

Stay where you are needed.

Love the people in front of you.

And trust that a life shaped like that—

not spectacular,

not efficient,

but attentive and given—

is not wasted.

It may look like small things: a table set again, a difficult conversation not avoided, a quiet act of generosity no one names, a long obedience that no longer feels dramatic.

But this is how the Kingdom takes root—

not in what dazzles,

but in what is given, again and again, in love.

And that kind of life, however hidden,

will not be lost.

Beneath all of this is something we do not generate for ourselves.

The hope we hold is not that things will steadily improve, or that our efforts will add up to something we can measure. It is that God is at work—patiently, persistently—bringing all things toward their renewal in Christ.

That does not remove the weight of the present. But it does mean that faithfulness is never futile, even when it feels small or unseen.

And we do not carry that alone.

The Christian life was never meant to be sustained by individuals managing their own discipleship. It is held, in part, by communities who remind one another what is true, who share burdens, who practice together a different way of being in the world.

Which means this kind of life—courageous, limited, attentive—will always be a shared one.

Not driven by our own strength, but sustained by grace.

And that, too, is part of what it means to become like Jesus.