Most of us have a private list of comforts. A pot of chicken soup on a Saturday. The ceiling fan turning in the bedroom on a hot night. The particular chair on the veranda that has moulded itself to your back. The sound of the gate and knowing it is your child coming home. We work hard for these things, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying them.
But home comforts have a way of shrinking our idea of comfort itself. We begin to think of it as a feeling that money and good planning can secure: the right house, the right insurance, a generator for when the power goes. Then something happens that none of those things can touch, and we discover how thin that kind of comfort really is.
A different order of things
Paul opens his second letter to the Corinthians with a line of praise that has carried a great many people through a great many bad nights:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4, NKJV)
Two things stand out. First, the comfort comes in the tribulation, not instead of it. Paul is writing as someone who had just come through something he describes a few verses later as a burden beyond his strength. Second, the comfort does not stop with the person who receives it. It is meant to be passed along. God comforts us “that we may be able to comfort” others.
That second point changes how we might think about our homes.
The house that had already been through it
Consider a scene that plays out, in one form or another, in many Caribbean communities after a bad storm. Two households on the same lane. One family lost part of their roof in a hurricane some years back. They remember the first night: sleeping in the one dry room, the smell of wet mattresses, the shame of asking for help, the church brother who turned up with a ladder and a tarpaulin before anyone had called him. They rebuilt, slowly. They learned which hurricane straps to ask for and how to check the fascia boards before the season starts.
Years later, a storm takes the roof of the young couple two houses down. The older family does not need to be told what to do. They know that the first need is not advice but a dry place for the baby to sleep. They know that the couple will be too proud, or too stunned, to ask. They know which hardware store might still have stock, which neighbour has a chainsaw, and how long the insurance paperwork can take. They open their spare room, and their knowledge, without making a speech about it.
That is 2 Corinthians 1 in working clothes. The comfort the older family once received has become comfort they can give. Their hard season was not wasted. It became equipment.
Comfort is not the same as ease
It helps to be honest here. Nobody should romanticise a flooded house or a lost job. Paul does not say suffering is pleasant. He says God is present in it, and that the comfort He gives is real, lasting and shareable. “Ease” is a sofa and a cold drink. “Comfort”, in the older sense of the word, carries the idea of being strengthened. It is what gets you up the next morning to start shovelling mud.
A house built only for ease tends to close its doors. It has invested so much in being a refuge from the world that it has no room for the world’s trouble. A house that knows the comfort of God can afford to be more open. Its security does not rest entirely on the locks and the grilles.
Small ways a home becomes a place of comfort
Most of us will never house a family after a hurricane. The principle still applies on an ordinary Tuesday. A few examples:
- Keeping a spare key, a spare mattress or a few basic supplies with a neighbour in mind, not just your own household.
- Sharing what you learned the hard way. If you went through a difficult purchase, a boundary dispute or a family land matter, the most useful comfort you can give someone in the same place is often a calm account of what happened and who helped.
- Being the one who visits after a bereavement, not only at the nine-night but in the quieter weeks after, when the casseroles stop coming.
- Letting your children see you receive help graciously. Comfort flows more easily in a family that is not ashamed of needing it.
Hope that he will deliver us again
Paul ends that opening passage with a line that sounds as if it was written by someone who had just watched the floodwaters recede: God “delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us” (2 Corinthians 1:10, NKJV). Past, present and future, all in one sentence.
Homes are fragile things. Roofs lift, pipes burst, jobs end, marriages strain, the old people we built the house around eventually leave it. None of us can guarantee the comforts on our private list. But we can know the God of all comfort, and we can let the comfort He gives us spill over our own fence into someone else’s yard. That may be the best use a home can be put to.
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