Jesus is not my Snuggie

Remember last year when Snuggies were on everyone's Christmas list? I know...I didn't get it either. Twenty million Snuggies were sold by January of 2009 and four million were sold in 2009. They were a cultural phenomenon that were initially mocked and parodied on TV, yet come Christmas time everyone wanted one. My mother even knit Snuggies for all my nieces. Personally, I was repulsed by this marketing gimmick that infested us like a plague. It's a blanket with ARMS!!!

I think what makes these Snuggies so attractive is they are a comfort blanket. When we've had a bad day or there's horrible weather outside we love to curl up in a blanket and escape into a book or TV show. They are our "safe place." My comfort blanket is a blanket I've had since I was an infant. I affectionately call it my "cold blanket."

In a recent coffee conversation with a friend I made the statement "Jesus is not our Snuggie!" The problem is that we tend to treat him that way. We keep Jesus neatly folded up on the shelf of our life and reserve him for those bad days. On those bad days we haul him down and wrap ourselves in the promises of "God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1) or "...in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). Both of these promises are true and need to be anchors of our faith, however, we cannot reduce Jesus to our Snuggie, to our comfort blanket.

When we look at Scripture we do see that Christ is our source of comfort and strength. We also see that life in Christ is not safe. When we look at the lives of Christ and his Apostles where did we ever get the idea that life in Christ is comfortable let alone safe? Christ was born into a world with a bounty on his head, he was led into the desert to be challenged by satan. Eleven of the Apostles were killed for following Christ. For the first 3 centuries of our faith the church met surrounded by corpses in the catacombs under the city of Rome. So why are we surprised when our lives are uncomfortable, or when we experience more than we can bare? These are the times that we learn what it truly means for Christ to be our comfort and our strength. It is in these times that we come to know the truth of Christ's promises.