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Perhaps the most important single moment in my spiritual development was the moment that I realized that grown-ups aren’t supposed to be comfortable all, or even most of the time. We all need to be more comfortable being uncomfortable.



This observation came all at once, at a single moment, almost 20 years ago, and it completely upended my life. I will share just a little bit about the moment. I was teaching at a small college in West Virginia. I had been out of graduate school for three years, and I was both the youngest and the only non-tenured member of a department of ten people. And then I became the chair.



There were a lot of circumstances at play that don’t really make sense to rehash here. Suffice it to say that being chair at that point in my career–in a department with nine other people who would, in three years, literally take a vote on whether or not I could keep my job–made me extremely uncomfortable. For a whole bunch of reasons, though, not becoming chair (and, therefore, putting my career in the hands of the person who would become chair if I didn’t) made me extremely uncomfortable.



After a long and sleepless dark night of the soul, I decided to embrace academic administration–a decision that has had profound consequences for my professional life. And I also decided to embrace being uncomfortable most of the time–a decision that has had profound implications for my spiritual life. Because, like most human beings, I don’t like being uncomfortable. That’s why they call it “uncomfortable.” But this desire for comfort in all things–and at any price–has profoundly negative consequences in both professional and personal lives.

There are lots of things that make people uncomfortable, of course, but the one I want to focus on here is the discomfort that comes from conflict with other people. We like to have peaceful relations–or, absent peace, at least the absence of outward conflict that lets us pretend that everything is just fine.

But a certain portion of the population does not feel this way. Some people don’t mind conflict and are, in fact, rather good at it. In every organization that I have ever been a part of, such people end up accumulating power far above their level of competence simply by threatening to make people uncomfortable. I have seen whole institutions held hostage by that one person who just shows up and makes everybody else cringe.



So, here’s the thing: when somebody’s basic superpower is that they know how to make me uncomfortable, my willingness to be uncomfortable acts like toxic-human Kryptonite. It entirely removes the threat. When I decided to pursue a career in academic administration, I also decided that I was going to spend the rest of my life simply living with a permanent, low-level discomfort punctuated by occasional bouts of through-the-roof anxiety.



And, to tell the truth, it just isn’t that hard to deal with it. If all of my discomfort were removed today, I would probably miss it.

But this isn’t a post about being an academic administrator. It is a post about being part of a Church. All sorts of things about this make me uncomfortable, but the two biggest ones, I think, are: 1) which people in my life would I come into conflict with if I weren’t part of the Church?; and 2) which people in my life will I come into conflict if I remain part of the Church? And I include myself as one of the people in both categories.

I am using “come into conflict with” here very generally. It includes fights with partners and spouses, alienation from parents and loved ones, and that squirming feeling I have every time one of my academic friends says something like, “Oh, you went to BYU, are you a Mormon?” (This is, with certain cultural adjustments, how that question makes me feel.)



Increasingly, as the institutional Church stakes out positions on social issues that I cannot accept, I have to add myself to the list of people who I have to justify my decision to stay. And if I were to decide to leave, I would have to add myself to the list of people asking, “How can you turn your back on your heritage like that?”

So, no matter what happens, my spiritual and religious decisions about the Church are going to make me overwhelmingly uncomfortable. They are going to involve guilt, fear anxiety, social conflicts, and even conflicts between different aspects of my self. In many ways, this is an enviable position, since there is no comfortable option to flee towards. If there were, I might take it–and fleeing conflict towards comfort is rarely the right choice.



When we choose something because it minimizes our discomfort, we are handing a huge amount of power over to the people, institutions, and situations that are good at producing discomfort. We are saying, in effect, “just don’t make me feel rotten, and you can have whatever you want.” And usually, the people, institutions, and situations that say this want everything we have.



So this is my advice, and it is advice for leaders, followers, Mormons, ex-Mormons, post-Mormons, people who still want to say “Mormons,” people who don’t, and just about everybody else: Get a lot more comfortable being uncomfortable. Since you probably will spend a lot of your life in discomfort caused by the fear of coming into conflict with other people, you might as well learn to like it.