“My eighth rule of success,” the Interviewer says, “is to stay uncomfortable.” He’s talking about making choices in life, and not just staying in your comfort zone.

I’m listening to this podcast—the Interviewer and his two subjects on topics ranging comfortably from Buddhist practices to travel to the character of Canadians compared to Americans—because I’m nervously wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.

I’m wondering, in passing, what the Interviewer’s other rules are, if “stay uncomfortable” is #8… and also, I’m thinking that I must be succeeding like crazy right now, because I’ve just agreed to do something I’m completely clueless about. Our lives intersected (the Interviewer’s and mine) in the form of blog-comments, and next thing you know, I’ve agreed to go on his podcast. We’ve set a time for Monday, and he’ll email me a link. I realize I don’t even know what technology we’re using—am I talking on my phone? Or should I dig around and find that better-quality headset for my computer? I’m pretty sure I can rule out smoke signals, but that’s the only thing I do know about podcasting, if that can be said to be a fact about podcasting.

I used to be much more… glib… than I am now. I didn’t used to have to search for my words. I used to sift my vocabulary with ease, and on the fly, mining for that word with precisely the right nuance, without even breaking the cadence of my sentence. Now I can find myself scratching and scrambling to fill in a blank created by the disappearance of an everyday word. “Pancake,” say, or “toothpaste.” I will vote for any political candidate who promises to reverse the accelerating slide of words into slipperiness—because I’m by-gosh blaming the words, not my age!

It’s not a problem when I’m writing, because I can take those extra few beats to fish up the word I want, and no one can tell I had to pause for it. And I don’t care much in the everyday, because in general it’s not a big deal if I have to pause for some extra seconds to finish my sentence—or I work around it by describing that thing I’m trying to name. But I don’t want to sound like an idiot to the Interviewer’s audience by having to resort to work-around words like “toothbrush-sauce.” (My husband would hand me the Colgate without blinking—but then, he knows me very well.)

All that to say… I love the idea of being invited to someone’s podcast… but it’s surely something that’s not in my comfort zone…

…And now I’m laughing. I just took my hands off the keyboard and picked up my coffee mug… the side of which says “Have Faith, not Fear.”

Sometimes God just taps me on the head and says, “Hey. Bozo! Pay attention.” I’m feeling that, literally seconds after typing the words “not in my comfort zone,” the appearance of “not fear” on a coffee mug, (or rather, the suddenly-noticing of those words on the cup I use every day, and barely see anymore) is one of those hey-bozo moments. A reminder that, first of all, this is not earth-shattering stuff… And secondly, that God’s got my back, even on non-earth-shattering stuff.

Stay tuned…