365 Days of the Great Names of God, Day 343: Giver of Comfort

Giver of Comfort

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God." (2 Corinthians 1:3,4 NIV)

My husband and I were talking about comfort last night. We've recently experienced a sudden and deep loss in our church family, and I was observing yet again that, ever since the equally sudden and deep loss almost ten years ago of my father-in-law, my husband and my mother-in-law have been able to comfort, respectively, other children who have lost parents and other spouses who have lost mates. And they can do it in a way that no one else quite can.

The comfort they can offer is the comfort they themselves have received. It is a hard kind of comfort to come by. They would not have chosen to be so familiar with it. Yet this brand of comfort is powerful to give in a way that only something costly to get can be.

Comfort as it used in God's Word—particularly in relation to the Holy Spirit as our Comforter—is less about soothing someone and more about helping them to go on. It is better represented by a strong hand extended over the edge of a cliff you're trying to scale than it is by a warm blanket wrapped around you.

Yet I believe comforting "those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive" allows for a merging of both: of helping and of soothing. And those who have been through the hard places where they have "received" this comfort are able to offer strengthened versions of these. The comfort they have to give is like a strong limb or a heavy quilt. Theirs is comforting muscle that has been built up in trial. Theirs is comforting warmth that has been stitched together in loss.

Oh friends, if you've been through a trial or a loss that put you on the receiving end of God's comfort, you now possess something valuable forged in those fires: comfort so hard to get but so healing to give.

And because God never wastes our pain, if you are journeying through a season of trial or loss right now—though you would not have chosen to come into it and probably long to get out of it— this redemption lies on the other side: someday you will be able to give someone else the help and soothing you are receiving from God right now... and it will be some of the strongest, heaviest comfort they'll ever know.