2 Corinthians 1:3-4 “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.”
Up until the sixth grade all the elementary children in my school were divided into homerooms alphabetically. My last name being Creech, I’d become quite comfortable with all the kids who shared my distinction of being in the first part of the alphabet. In sixth grade we landed in Miss Jackson’s room. If there had been a lottery in those days, we would have felt we won it. Everyone loved Miss Jackson. She was most known for reading Little House on the Prairie books to her classes. She made school fun and exciting.
About midway through the first semester, the school decided to create a new class for kids with higher grades. One other student and I from Miss Jackson’s class made the cut and were pulled out of Laura Ingalls Wilder bliss and thrust into a classroom of strangers. I cried unabashedly in front of my classmates, but the policy was nonnegotiable. My only comfort came through sympathetic friends who watched as I was drug away to the “A” class. It felt like the end of the world in my12-year-old mind.
We live in a fallen world, one where comfort is as much a necessity in life as a warm blanket on cold nights. A young mother miscarries her longed-for baby. A spouse receives a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. A company downsizes and you, along with your job, are squeezed out. What do we do in times like these where neither tears nor prayers can reverse the outcome?
We ask the Comforter to come.
He promises his presence will ease our grief and lighten our burden. Because he is the Father of compassion and God of all comfort, he is able to blunt the edge of our disappointment. He will comfort us in all our troubles and I think all means every single one. From the relatively minor disappointments like leaving Miss Jackson to those that seem inconsolable.
We are not promised we’ll be given understanding of why life happens the way it does. But one thing we can always count on: the Comforter will come.