Comfortable

As I sit here waiting for Jonah's  MRI to be complete, my mind drifts back to a devotion that I keep re-reading about comfort.  I'd love to give proper credit, but all I know is that it comes from the Bible app on my phone, from the "Finding Comfort in Pain" plan.  

"How do we respond when we experience great pain, failure or struggle?  In addition to other things, we pray to God for His comfort now and His supernatural relief from discomfort later.  In this mode of thinking, God's comfort represents a barrier between pain and us.  Comfort is to sleeping on a feather bed as discomfort is to sleeping on the rocky ground.  But, should we seek a comfy life when Jesus himself had no place to lay his head?  Doesn't God desire to comfort His people?

The history for the word "comfort" reveals an important narrative.  The word is made from two Latin word parts, com- , an intensifying prefix which means "together with", and fortis, which means "strong or strength".  Later, the Latin word confortare comes to mean, "to strengthen much".  Eventually, an Old French word, conforter, would add words like "solace" and "help" to the definition.  In the 14th century, another French word conforten is defined as "to cheer up, console".  Finally, by the 17th century, the English version of the word implies the sense of physical ease that we understand today.  In about a millennia, this word went from meaning "together-strength" to meaning "pain-barrier.""

I find "together-strength" comfort in knowing that "I am the Lord, and I do not change" (Malachi 3:6). Alone, I don't have the strength to bear the waiting and wondering - is chemo working?  Does Jonah have a chance?  Are we able to continue to delay radiation and protect his developing brain?  However, with "together-strength" I wait, and know that the Lord is God and that He does not change - no matter what the MRI holds, and that is the comfort that carries while we wait.