I arrived in the Philippines in the early 1990s as a single missionary. There was no partner to share breath-stealing rides on brightly painted passenger jeeps barreling down patched streets and shooting the gap between vehicles. There was no one with whom to savor freshly baked types of bread, chin-dripping and lip-puckering tropical fruits sold on sidewalks. Nor was there someone to say, “Go back to sleep, it’s not an attack,” after a coconut tree dropped its payload in the middle of the night onto the corrugated steel roof above our heads. Most of all there was no hand to give a supportive squeeze, months later, to say, “By God’s grace we can do this.”
In spite of that, one particular couple went out of their way to make me a part of their family. They would ask how I was doing, ask about my family back home, listen to me, help me move from one house to another, invite me over on holidays, and share their food.
They embodied compassion, and I can’t imagine my early days here without them. Similarly, I can’t imagine living in this world without God when death can take a parent or child s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y or in an instant; the boss’s index finger summoning you into his office is a prelude to being laid off; or coming home to an emptied house, a crying baby, and finding a note saying, “I’m out of here.”
The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:3,4:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.
Without the God described in the onionskin pages of the Bible, we would live in a world without any hope for compassion. Verse 3 says God is the Father of compassion. Compassion would have no existence without God as its progenitor. There would be little hope for comfort either—compassion’s cousin. The same passage says He is the God of all comfort.
If you have seen comfort, you have seen God. No matter what form it comes in—an aptly spoken word, a listening ear, a meaningful passage read, or a simple prayer whispered by a friend—it comes from God.
God doesn’t have to be cajoled, begged, harangued, or suckered into extending comfort. He never looks for loopholes in the fine print.
No El Niño will dry it up, no dam can hold it back, no Scrooge can hoard it away, no stock market crash can wipe it out, no forest fire can consume it. It can’t be eroded or corroded, overdrawn or overcharged.
We don’t even have to ask for it or wait for the planets to align. His comfort is always there when trials of Katrina-like force assail or mild winds merely rock the boat. We are in better hands than Allstate’s.
But with the privilege comes a responsibility. What we receive we should pass on to others.
Copyright © 2010 by David Harlen Brooks
