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 receive from God.
2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (NIV)
Handing On What You Got
Her phone has two deleted drafts on it, both to the same friend from college, both saying in different words that she cannot do this job. It is four o’clock. The building is nearly empty and the first-year teacher is still at her desk with half the lights off.
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 receive from God.
Those are the first words after the greeting of a letter whose writers also say they were under great pressure, far beyond their ability to endure, so that they despaired of life itself. The praise and the despair belong to the same people and the same trouble. Nobody is writing from a good year.
The comfort in that sentence keeps moving. It comes from God, it reaches the woman at the desk, and it goes back out in the shape it arrived in.
The trouble on the other end does not have to match. Anyone in any trouble at all is in range of it, and we pass on whatever was handed to us first. Much of what gets offered instead is advice with a warm voice on it. The comfort that lands knows which Friday, and it does not arrive with a lesson attached to the back of it.
The teacher at the desk has no shortage of advice. There is a strategy in every drawer in that building. She needs one sentence from someone who stayed in the work and remembers who got her through it.
In the hallway the next morning the teacher from two doors down stops and says, “My first year I cried in the supply closet every Friday until Thanksgiving.”
A Prayer to Remember
You got me through a bad year once, and you did it through a friend who knew what to say to me. I have kept that and passed none of it on. Show me the one who needs the same kind this week, and I will walk down the hall before I talk myself out of going.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
