There is a particular kind of season you have learned to call peaceful, the kind where nothing is asking anything hard of you, where the calendar is calm, and the relationships are quiet, and the phone gives you just enough to keep the ache at bay, and if you are honest, some of what you have been calling rest is closer to an avoidance you have quietly baptized with a more respectable name. Comfort rarely announces itself as the thief it is. It simply makes the easier thing feel like the wiser thing, until one day you notice you have built a whole life around not being stretched, and the muscles you were meant to develop for endurance and for love have gone soft from disuse.
Jonathan Eckert has spent more than three decades watching what happens to people, young and old, when comfort becomes the organizing principle of a life, and in this conversation he draws the line most of us have blurred, the line between happiness that is circumstantial, self-focused, and fleeting, and the joy the Lord actually offers, which is not the absence of struggle but the very fuel that allows us to struggle well. We talk about the frictionless world we have engineered for ourselves and what it is quietly costing our capacity to be human, about why Scripture rarely lets joy stand apart from trial, and about what it means to count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds, not because the trial is good, but because of what the Lord forms in us when we refuse to run from it.
So here is the harder question this conversation puts in front of you: what is the one thing you have been avoiding in the name of peace, the relationship you have kept at arm’s length, the conversation you have not had, the discomfort you have quietly managed away, and what would it look like to run straight at it before the day is over? For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, and He did not spare Himself the hard thing that love required. In the end, neither can we.
About Jonathan Eckert
Jonathan Eckert is the Copple Professor of Educational Leadership at Baylor University and executive director of the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Before Baylor, he taught and coached students outside Chicago and Nashville, earned his doctorate at Vanderbilt, served in the U.S. Department of Education under both the Bush and Obama administrations, and trained teachers at Wheaton College. After more than thirty years spent watching what actually forms resilient, joyful people, he wrote The Happiness Crisis: How Adversity Can Build a Resilient and Joyful Next Generation, the book at the heart of this conversation.
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Resources Mentioned This Week
- The Happiness Crisis: How Adversity Can Build a Resilient and Joyful Next Generation
- Healing What You Can’t Erase: Transform Your Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health from the Inside Out
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