Comfort - Five Minute Friday

Comfort ye, my people, saith your God.

It's not a cozy comfort I'm thinking about. It's a comfort in knowing a cozy comfort awaits.

Sometimes life is hard. Busy and intense and protracted like labor. Which is not to say it isn't good. Life is good and hard. And comfortable.

Someday may never come, but someday I'm going to be able to sit down and say, "Yes, that was done well." Perhaps God's reward will come at heaven's gate; I want the comfort of knowing I am doing well so that I will hear His voice say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

That's definitely not cozy comfort. That's about being brave and patient and bare and strong and broken and determined for a long, long time. That's about doing the hard things when no one else does. But I take comfort from the promises that the work will bear fruit, comfort from the examples of those who have gone before and shown the way (and the fruit).

Here and now, today, my comfort often comes from making others comfortable. Is it coincidence that "comfort" starts the same way as "community" and "commitment"? I think not. I think comfort is something that comes when we share, when we pour out ourselves together in love.

Like Winnie the Pooh, though, I'm not sure I'm right about all this.

Wonder what Christopher Robin would say.