Quotes about Comfort

I like a prayer book and liturgy to guide me in my faith rather than falling back into my comfort zone of controlling reality with my learned and carefully chosen words, and without leaving it up to me to come up with what to say here and now when I just may not feel like it.

One of the great comforts of Israel's epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God for this Bible rather than a sanitized one where spiritual struggles of the darkest kind are brushed aside as a problem to be fixed rather than accepted as part of the journey of faith.

Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow—and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process. Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.

And either way, God is with you.

And he named him Noah, saying, “May this one comfort us in the labor and toil of our hands caused by the ground that the LORD has cursed.”

Then God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “What is wrong, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he lies.

And Isaac brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah and took Rebekah as his wife. And Isaac loved her and was comforted after his mother’s death.

During her severe labor, the midwife said to her, “Do not be afraid, for you are having another son.”

All his sons and daughters tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said. “I will go down to Sheol mourning for my son.” So his father wept for him.

When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they were distraught.

I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will surely bring you back. And Joseph’s own hands will close your eyes.”

And the LORD answered, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”