"Comfort, comfort my people, says...God. Speak tenderly...to her.” Isaiah 40:1
I stink at being sick. Down for the count because of illness. Staying home and waiting to heal. Every winter I try my best to keep at bay whatever virus is lurking in these chilly months. I get vaxxed. I mask when needed. I wash my hands.
I’m a good doobie!
But then every once in a rare while I just get sick. We all do. Sometimes very sick. And so, we have no choice but to lay low and hope and pray for just a little comfort. A little kindness. A little healing eventually.
My winter bug journey of these past two days is not for the shy of stomach or faint of heart and so I won’t gross you out with all the details but the version of the flu I caught includes “intestinal upset,” a sweaty fever, a throbbing headache, and nausea. It has also reduced my stamina so much that one trip up the stairs calls for a nap! (And it’s not COVID. I tested.)
But thank God, I am just starting to get off the couch on this Tuesday late afternoon after being down for the count from this past Sunday morning to now. I’m not looking for sympathy or “poor you’s!” There’s plenty of sickness to go around right now and I’m blessed to have a job that can spare me, a warm house to recover within. That’s a comfort. I found comfort in recuperation by drinking something like four liters of ever dependable ginger ale and nibbling lots of orange ritz crackers and eating bowls of bland oatmeal and sleeping on and off and watching three movies in one day. Hunkering down on my favorite chair, the aptly named La-Z-Boy, and huddling under a fuzzy blue blanket to ward off the chills.
All comforts.
But the best comfort of all came from a stack of red and white heart-decorated get-well cards from members of the middle school youth group, at the church I serve. My colleague Victoria, who helps run the group, dropped the hand-made cards off to me Sunday night, having used the creation of these greetings to teach those kids about our responsibility as people of faith and humans, to comfort others when they are sick. Or when they are lonely. To offer comfort to a person who just lost a loved one to death. To comfort the folks who find winter just too darn long, the darkness in this second month just darn too pervasive. To offer comfort to a shut-in who can’t do much more than look out the window, or to someone in memory care who could sure use a cheer me up. To comfort folks who really need comfort on these cold days: the homeless, the hungry.
We can all use comfort in this life. I know I certainly do, especially when I get the creeping crud!
So, in squiggly tween penmanship, those wonderful young people wrote out in deep red ink, all their heartfelt and sacred words of comfort to me…”Pastor John…I hope you feel better and can come to our next meeting!” “Missed you tonight—best wishes!” “Thinking of you!” “Please get better!” The greetings were especially comforting, because this was the first meeting I’d missed in a long, long time. I really wanted to be there.
But boy, did those cards and kind words lighten my heart, soften my soul, and remind me what a gift it is to offer comfort to others, (which I get to do for my job!) and also to be comforted. God comforts us. We comfort others. And the circle of comfort continues.
To live a life of comfort means we live to comfort. To wipe away the tears of the grieving and to tie the shoes of those too old or too young to do so. We comfort a child woken up by a scary nightmare and dark shadows at night and we comfort a prisoner who clutches at bars that will never set him free. Comfort never asks, “Do you deserve it?” Instead, it always asks, “Do you want it?”
I always answer yes. I hope you do too. Comfort receivers always make the best comfort givers.
Comfort’s kind of a hard sell these days, in much of our culture. We are living in a sharp elbowed world in 2024. Some political candidates know no boundaries in the crudeness and violence of their rhetoric, followed in a close second by their vitriolic minions. So much of mass media is a mass slugfest, pundits pounding pundits 24/7 on all those news channels. Public meetings erupt with, and are interrupted by, the outraged, who fume and yell and don’t want much to listen or to even just sit down and talk things through.
We need comfort—human comfort, God’s comfort—now more than ever. Like a balm to heal our sin sick souls and a salve to repair our broken world and relationships with our neighbors. We could do worse than to turn to the lessons about comfort offered by a bunch of 6th, 7th,and 8th graders.
“Get better!”
What a beautiful hope for each of us, for all creation. May you comfort. May you know comfort. And when you finish reading this, please share some comfort. Call someone or write to someone or connect with someone who needs some comfort on this cold February day.
The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.
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