Comfort You Will Hand to Someone

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort; who comforts us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, through the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3-4, WEB)

Paul blesses God as the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. It is a long sentence, and it circles back on itself on purpose, because the comfort in it keeps moving from hand to hand.

Read slowly, that sentence tells you what your suffering is for. The comfort God gives you in your affliction is not only for you, tucked away for your private relief. It is being deposited in you so that you can hand it on to the next man who is where you have been. God comforts you, and then he sends you to a brother with the very thing you received, so that the mercy passes through you rather than stopping with you. You become a channel, not a reservoir.

This reframes the years you have spent in this fight, and it does so gently. Every dark stretch you survived by the mercy of God has made you into a man who can sit with someone else in that same dark and actually help, because you are not guessing at what he feels. You know what it is to be there and to be comforted there, and that knowledge is a kind of currency you carry to others. A man who has never struggled can offer advice. A man who has been comforted in the pit can offer presence, and presence is what the other man needs.

So the affliction is not only something happening to you, a private weight you carry alone. It is quietly qualifying you to be useful to men who cannot yet imagine surviving what you have survived. Somewhere ahead of you is a brother who will be able to hear the gospel from you precisely because you have been where he is. The comfort you are receiving today has a name on it that is not only yours.

Father of mercies, comfort me in what I am carrying, and make me a man who can carry that comfort to another. Do not let my affliction be for nothing.