Daily Manna · Day 268 · September 25
The Father of Comfort
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
We are not good at comforting each other. Someone has lost a person they love, the silence feels like too much for us, and so we arrive with a tidy sentence. When we leave, they feel further away than when we came.
So read this passage carefully for what it does not claim. It never claims the comfort makes the trouble worth it. It does not say God sent the trouble to train you as a helper, even though the text is often made to say that. It does not promise that comfort comes in the same amount as the suffering, or that it arrives on time, or in a form you would have chosen. And it never once says you will understand.
What it does say is that God "comforteth us in all our tribulation." That comfort has a direction built into it: "that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble." Paul is specific about what gets passed along: "by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." What you hand on is the very comfort you were given, and it is worth more than any advice or lesson you worked out afterwards. Notice, too, how the two halves of the sentence widen. On the receiving side Paul says "all our tribulation," and on the giving side he says "any trouble." He does not require your trouble to match theirs.
So you do not have to make sense of what happened to you before you can help someone else. You only need to have been comforted in it by "the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort." That is the whole qualification. Many people who have it do not know they do, and you may be one of them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 268 is Hope Deferred (Proverbs 13:12).