Life Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone
In 2017, my wife and I returned to the mainland after living in Hawaii for three months. Crystal clear blue ocean water with the most beautiful coral structures and fish we'd ever seen, vibrant rainbows, huge honu (sea turtles), beautiful beaches, rainforests, and an abundance of waterfalls. Every day we were seeing things that a lot of people only have the opportunity to see on postcards or the Discovery Channel. It was paradise. Well, part of it was.
For many of us, a trip to Hawaii means a vacation. You stay in a nice hotel with a friendly staff who keeps your room clean and stocked with towels and fresh bed sheets. You don't have to worry about maintaining your rental car long-term in the salty humid environment. You don't mind spending $100 or more on dinner every night, because hey, it's vacation. And you can spend your time at the beach under the palm trees knowing that, when you're ready, you have a nice, comfortable, air conditioned hotel room to go back to and relax without having to work the next day. The point is, being in vacation mode in Hawaii, or anywhere for that matter, is vastly different than actually living and working there.
In our case, my wife had an opportunity come up at work that allowed us to travel to Hawaii.
When we arrived on the Big Island, we stayed at a very nice hotel on the beach for a few days and enjoyed everything that came with being in vacation mode. It was awesome. That all changed when the time came to drive to the other side of the Island and get to work.
Our first stop was to sign our lease contract and pick up the keys to our condo. But something stood out to us about the town we were staying in. It looked terrible. Scary terrible. Like one of those areas in downtown Atlanta you purposefully avoid because you value your life. Paint was peeling off of buildings, roofs were falling in, the roads and sidewalks were falling apart, and I felt a general unsanitary vibe everywhere I looked. Almost immediately I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Trying to stay positive, however, I told myself this was probably just a bad area of town.
**Side note -- I've lived in the Atlanta area my entire life and have grown accustomed to the way unsafe areas look. Hawaii has a totally different culture. Yes, there are "bad" areas in Hawaii, but I had to re-learn what those looked like. The vast majority of the town we were staying in turned out to be very safe and friendly. It was just poverty stricken.
After arriving at our condominium and seeing the ocean right behind it I felt a little better. We may have been in a slum but at least we had the beach in our back yard. Walking into our unit, however, my stomach sank even more. We were immediately greeted with a thick, hot, humid, muggy wall of air that smelled like my great grandparents' old cedar chest they hadn't opened in 20 years. It got worse the further into the condo we went, eventually climaxing in the master bathroom with a strong odor of sewage.
We began inspecting our unit further, and the muggy air quickly snowballed into an overwhelming mountain of issues. So many in fact, that I won't try to explain all of them. I'll just cover the highlights. Windows were stuck open, vertical blinds rusted in place, there were holes in the walls and ants swarming in the kitchen, and evidence of mold was everywhere. We couldn't even plug in our phones to charge without the electrical outlets sparking. And if all of this wasn't bad enough, it was 85 degrees outside and we had no air conditioning.
"Oh my God what have we done," I said in a panic. We had signed our lease contract not even an hour ago and didn't even think to look at the condo first. Having the beach was nice but it definitely wasn't worth everything else, I thought.
There was no way out, however; we were stuck. Without friends and without family to lean on. And for the next two months, in the hot humid environment of the Hawaiian rainforest, we were the most physically uncomfortable we have ever been in our lives. Many nights we couldn't even sleep.
But in the midst of our discomfort, and without realizing it at the time, we started to grow. We had no other option. We were forced to get out and make new friends. We were forced to learn how to live without air conditioning. We were forced to navigate a new and intimidating environment. We were forced to learn how to take care of a vehicle in the salt-heavy humidity. We were forced to learn the local culture. And we were forced to learn how to balance work and life in a place like no other on the planet.
Throughout the Bible is a theme of having to step out of your comfort zone in order to grow into better and greater things. Moses had to deal with his speech impairment before leading Israel out of captivity. Abraham had to deal with the thought of losing his son, Isaac, to follow God's promise. Paul had to deal with blindness before taking God's message to the gentiles.
Neale Donald Walsch even says, "life begins at the end of your comfort zone." And when I look back at our time in Hawaii, this is exactly what happened. Yes, we were uncomfortable, but by the end of our journey we were growing and living more loudly than we ever had. If we had chosen to keep our heads down and hide in our condo, we would have missed out on a lot of life changing experiences.
So I encourage you, the next time you may be feeling uncomfortable, as long as you're not in an unsafe environment, do not be afraid, but be ready to grow, and then to live.