When I was in seminary I once heard a homiletics professor state: "Good preaching comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable." As a driven young man in my twenties I dutifully scribbled that down in my notebook. But while that sounds true-it certainly is pithy-in the nearly two decades of pastoral ministry since then I have discovered something: no one is comfortable. Everyone I know is in one way or another uncomfortable due to external...