A few years ago my back started hurting. It would be killing me when I woke up in the morning. I mentioned it to my buddy Heath “Corn-Wallace” Corallis, who’s not only an all round good guy, but also a peer in the ministry.

“It hurts the most when you wake up?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “I even almost dread mornings now because I know I’m going to be in pain.”

He shifted his weight onto one foot, crossed his arms as his eyes narrowed. This is Heath’s thinking posture, which means he’s either coming up with a solution to your problem or contemplating something completely sarcastic to say. “How old is your bed?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve only had the bed less than a year but it was given to me second hand so it may be ten or twenty years old. It has this valley in the middle of the bed where the springs are broken down.”

“Drew,” Heath said as he put his hand firmly on my shoulder, “My Grand-pappy says there are two things that every man needs to spend some money on: a good pair of shoes and a good mattress, because you are always in one or the other.” Then he shot one of his classic, killer smiles, either because Heath has never met his “Grand-pappy”, or as I failed to mention it earlier, at that time in his life, Heath was also a part-time mattress salesman.

After some discussion with my wife, we decided that Heath may be right, and that we would use our tax return and splurge on a new king size mattress and all the things to go with it, which can be quite pricy. Long-story-short, because we had been faithful in a very challenging ministry at our local church, a member of that church wanted to bless us and we ended up paying a fraction of the cost.

Heath had been dead on. Within a week I felt like a new man. Though my wife and I quickly realized we would have to move soon since the bed took up most of the bedroom in our 460 square foot aqua-green apartment. The next-thing, right?

This is a great illustration of another reason we are running after the next-thing: comfort. We want to be comfortable, which isn’t a terrible thing. The problem is we very often make it our one-thing. Why? When we have comfort we feel like everything is going to be o.k. and we don’t need to worry about everything else in life. Comfort is enjoyable. It is that secure feeling of cuddling up to your favorite blanket or teddy bear when you were a child. Comfort lulls us to sleep.

Comfort is not just found in material things, it is found in relationships, ways of life, schedules, cultures and habits. Comfort isn’t necessarily a bad in itself. (Believe me, I’m not giving up my king size bed anytime soon.) Comfort can be a good. But I want you to think about the following statement I have heard said several times before, “Good is often the enemy of the best.” When we make comfort the object of our desires we begin to lose track of the best in life and trade it for good.

Are you trading your destiny for comfort?