Comfy

I love things that have been around along time.

I find comfort in them. From jewelry to furniture, chances are if it's been around along time I'm going to love it.

In that spirit of loving old things, I'll confess that I have two  giant bath towels that I've had since college.
I received them both as a graduation gift from a sweet family I'd known since I was a little thing.

If you saw them you'd know how old they were just from the colors.
That's right, peach and sea foam green.  They matched my  lovely Laura Ashely bed set with stripes on one side and a pretty floral on the other.
There was nothing as trendy as Laura Ashley and sea foam green in the summer of 1989.

(I've been seeing sea foam green making it's comeback and it makes me smile)


You should know that The Hubs does not use these towels. They are strictly mine.

You should also know that our bathroom has never been those colors the entire time of our marriage, and you should also know that yes indeed we do have newer/nicer/matching towels.
That I rarely use.
I love 'my' towels.

A few weeks ago, when The Hubs was bringing me 'my' towel (after he'd warmed it up in the dryer-isn't he awesome?!?!) he asked the dreaded question.

"Why do we still have this towel? Wouldn't you prefer a newer one?"

No. No thank you.

He just shook his head, and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure he was wondering about the crazy he was married too.

See, as you can imagine, those towels are pretty thread bare at this point. Any fluff has been stripped away over the years of use. Both are frayed around the edges and one (I can't believe I'm admitting this) has a giant whole at the bottom.

Really, they don't do their job very well anymore.
Yet, I can't seem to let them go.

I could say it's because I'm frugal or because I don't want to be wasteful, but really it's because I find some sort of comfort from having something around that's been with me so long.

I think sometimes in our lives we do that as well.  We keep doing the same routines; perhaps staying in the same church long after we should have moved on, keeping  the same job, sending our kids to the same type of schools, we know it's time to let go, to move on, but we can't or don't want to because it's comfortable.

We know God is calling us to better things but because that would have us leave the comfort of our situation -even if like my old towels it's no longer doing it's job-we simply refuse to budge.

Maybe it's ministry related, job related or something I can't even fathom of, that God is calling you to walk away from the comfort of something so familiar yet is no longer fulling it's purpose in your life.


(BTW, I'm not talking about marriage-God is NOT calling you to leave your marriage. Please don't read this and then go tell your spouse "Angie said it's ok for me to leave")

We settle for the familiar , even when really it's no longer as comfortable as we'd like to pretend.

We settle for what we know, instead of getting to know something new and fresh.

Even if what we know, is now frayed, wholly and thread bare  and no longer capable of doing the job we need it to, we'll take that any day over the unknown- the unfamiliar .

It's a hard choice.
Do we settle for the comfortable, or do we follow the calling to the unknown.

When choosing, I think it's good to remember that while what's familiar may appear more comfortable, like my aging towels, really what we think of as comfortable is really thread bare and itchy.

We've just gotten used to things feeling that way-and calling it comfy.