Comfort You Will Hand to Someone

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.

Read slowly, that sentence tells you what your suffering is for. The comfort God gives you in your affliction is not only for you. 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.

This reframes the years you have spent in this fight. 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. You know what it is to be comforted there, and that knowledge is a gift you carry to others.

So the affliction is not only something happening to you. It is quietly qualifying you to be useful to men who cannot yet imagine surviving. 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.