Daily Manna · Day 234 · August 22
Comfort Like a Mother
“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”
Grown people still want to be held, and are embarrassed about wanting it.
I am included in that. We are the ones other people call when it falls apart. We handle things. And underneath the handling is a want we would not say to anybody, because it sounds like a child's want and we are forty-eight years old.
God reaches for the most physical picture available and applies it to himself: As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you. He has used the image earlier in the book, answering people who were sure he had forgotten them, and there he asked whether a mother could forget her nursing child and then granted that some of them do. He does not claim mothers never fail. He says he is what they are at their best and does not fail where they do. And the chapter is not soft; fire and judgment sit a few lines below this sentence. The same verse gives the comfort an address, too: ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. Not wherever you happen to be aching. Where God is.
So do nothing with this. No plan, no resolution to be more open with people. Sit somewhere for three minutes and be quiet, and let the wanting be there without managing it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 234 is Nor Bear Any Grudge (Leviticus 19:18).