What are the limits of your Comfort Zone?

I've spent a lot of my adult life in prison.  Now, before you delete yourself as one of my subscribers, know that I wasn't an inmate.  As a minister with a psych background, I volunteered.  I worked with men, women and juvenile boys.  Once in a blue moon I worked with juvenile girls, but not often. 

My role was to help the inmates find a better way to live.  I often told them they really needed to change because they weren't very good at crime.  Good criminals were still free.  My prison work put me in front of  thousands of inmates over 16 years as I traveled all over Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Michigan.  It was intense, and sometimes intimidating, but it was extremely rewarding.

A number of years ago, I received a call from a local correctional facility.  They had a situation and wanted to know if I could help.  An inmate, who was HIV positive, was trying to spit in the eyes of the guards and they couldn't get close to him to put him back in his cell.  In the course of their initial struggle they had pushed him into a visitation cell and locked the door.  The visitation cell was about 3 feet deep and 6 feet wide.  There were two metal seats bolted to the floor and two windows for inmates to see and talk to family members.

The guards wanted to know if I would come over and try to talk this guy into going back to his cell.  They were afraid that he was going to make some type of fluid exchange with them and cause them to become HIV positive.  So, I told my wife I needed to go to the jail, and off I went.  Bless her heart.  The woman is a saint!

When I got there, the scene was just as described.  The inmate was in the cell screaming at them, and they were on the outside looking for a solution.  I asked them to open the door and let me in, and they did.  That might have been dumbest thing I ever did, but it didn't turn out that way.

When the prisoner saw me, he settled right down.  You see, in the prison I wasn't an "us" or a "them."  I was a third kind of person.  I was a man who volunteered his time to help them learn how to live a better life.  That's the way they saw it.   We ended up sitting on opposite ends of the cell facing each other with our backs to the wall.  We were so close that our feet touched.  I spent the next few hours talking to him, and in the end, I walked him out and back to his cell. 

That was a little uncomfortable.  Life is full of moments when we are pressured out of our comfort zones, and we can either take those moments and make something great out of them, or we can draw back and leave growth to others.  Not all growth moments are as intense as my prison story, but they don't have to be.  They can still challenge us beyond our comfort zones. 

Last Fall, I spent a couple weeks with a salesperson class and a bunch of potential new Realtors.  To them, it was like walking into that 3X6 cell.  It was intense.  They were taking on the biggest challenge of their lives, but they were facing it.  They all wanted a better life, and they wanted
 to have more control over their finances.  It was risky!

The jail situation would have been resolved one way or another.  The guards would have eventually gotten control of the situation, but there was a high probability that someone would have been hurt, maybe even fatally.  And, even though I was terribly uncomfortable initially, I didn't want to see it go the wrong way.  I hoped the ultimate outcome of my involvement would be a good thing, and it was, but I had to come out of my comfort zone to see it end well.