2024-02-20 A Meditation on Reassurance

“6 I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. 7 My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes. 8 Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. 9 The Lord has heard my plea; the Lord accepts my prayer.” (Ps 6:6-9 ESV)

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. 7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” (2 Cor 1:3-7 ESV)

There may be any number of assurances to keep the soldier plucky and engaged, to keep the laborer focused and productive, to keep the warrior alert and exemplary; all are some strange coping, or rather cause in our quieter hours for curiosity and fascination: why we do the things we do. Why we chalk up a day’s work or a Sabbath rest; why any of this, if ultimate questions still mock us and make us rather meek.

Therefore it behooves us to daydream or save the thought for a moment of downtime, to cope with not just belonging but roles and duties aimed our way. It behooves us to rise up, soldiering and laboring, on account of these fine souls to whom we were sent, or to this cohort to which we were engaged, or to this community to which we are Emblem and Mark, Sign and Portent; all these things in the knowledge that to us a lived experience is to others perhaps a time of trial or of sadness; we are curious about one another. We are curious to know why things work the way they do. And we are found better equipped, startled at our own makeshift digs or labors, wondrous that some Higher Power must need take the helm, as for us, because we cannot will things into existence, and that includes the inability to will into existence a Cause or Project. It includes the inability to will into existence anything that might comfort us that life wasn’t just meaningless cacophony.

The blessed hours of engagement and of reassured service: these are God-sent and they are bursting forth, onto the scene and into our hearts and minds. These ways we reassure and cope, pain alleviated and futility no longer checkering our thoughts. These ways we are found At the Ready for tomorrow’s engagement, and today’s early war. We know for a fact by now, proven and explained, that we will be in that heavenly cohort called Salvation, we will somehow be found laboring in the vineyard, fighting on the front, all these things because we asked not less of life but more of life. We pleaded, like the characters of the bible. We were somehow found situated and belonging simply out of the graciousness of life’s twists and turns. We had a zone of peace and reassurance.