Comfort

Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. - Job 1:21

We often associate comfort with joy and happiness. We make many decisions to be comfortable. Marketers capitalize on this idea and feeds our soul with the idea that we deserve to be happy by being comfortable - it's our right to be comfortable. Erik Raymond makes an insightful observation about this idea by saying, "Comfort is a deadly compass. It will lie to you just to protect you." Raymond is saying that our broken and sinful nature causes us to naturally seek death over life, darkness over light, and our way over God's way. When comfort is taken away from us, we either blame God or others around us. As we have seen in the Book of Job, comfort is associated with God's blessings that comes from obedience. Our compass draws us to do whatever it takes to regain this comfort which we have lost -- through repentance, obedience, cheating, lying, etc. Scripture, however, teaches us that God is our comfort (2 Corinthians 1:3-5). The absence of comfort is not necessarily a result of disobedience. The truth is, we do not know how God thinks. We are simply too limited to understand God. In our limitation, Scripture is teaching us to let God be God and trust Him. In other words, we need to live by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). We do not have to know why. As today's catechism teaches us, "God created us male and female in his own image to know him, love him, live with him, and glorify him. And it is right that we who were created by God should live to his glory." The Well Church, let us worship God in spirit and truth today. Let us live by faith and not by sight, and let God be God.