My love for Snoopy and the Peanuts Gang began on Christmas Eve 1968 when I received my plush Snoopy doll from my parents for Christmas. Since I was three years old at the time, no memory exists of the moment. I do have a picture taken by my dad of me of holding Snoopy with my mom looking on. I wasn’t a Snoopy fan before that moment, but since then Snoopy and I have had a nearly unbreakable bond. He’s brought plenty of comfort to the boy who has grown to be a man. Two of those moments come to mind.
Sometime around my eighth birthday I decided that I was too old for the plush doll to share my bed. A better place for him was on top of the wardrobe where he could watch over me and keep me safe. I felt like a big boy until the night I had a nightmare. Immediately, I got out of bed to climb up on a chair to retrieve my Snoopy so that he could comfort my fears through the rest of the night.
Then, when I was nine years old, I was admitted to the hospital with a prelude to a bleeding ulcer. I was very sick and spent three days at the children’s ward of Portland Adventist Hospital. Mom asked me what I wanted brought from home to make my stay easier. I told her I wanted my Snoopy, because I knew he would comfort me through the strange environment and separation anxiety. Unfortunately, I loved my Snoopy so much mom was embarrassed to bring the well-worn, formally white fat, soft, plush doll to the hospital. She bought me a knock-off Snoopy. I appreciated the effort, but he wasn’t Snoopy and I wasn’t nearly as comforted as I wanted.
Children are known for seeking comfort through a thumb, pacifier, a doll, or a blanket. They grow out of the need for the crutch, but usually find some replacement like foods, shopping, hobbies, or relationships. We never grow out of the need to be comforted.
As Paul opens his second letter to the Corinthians he bursts into worship saying, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 3). God is truly worthy of our praise, but the fireworks are only a small portion of Paul’s opening statement. God is praised, but like bacon wrapped around a hamburger, Paul wraps his praise with comfort. Nine times in five verses Paul drops the word comfort. Praising God, Paul acknowledges the role comfort plays in our lives. Such an unexpected pivot helps set the stage for what Paul will unpack throughout his letter to the Corinthians.
For the moment Paul makes two powerful statements about the role comfort plays, and that it’s rooted in God’s character.
First, God is praised because he comforts us. Paul says he is the “God of all comfort who comforts us in our troubles” (v. 3b-4). Suffering is a part of living. Troubles come with the world we live in and no one is immune to it. We are all the walking wounded, as grief torments every fiber of our lives; physically, spiritually, emotionally. We hurt. We cry. We ache. We do not need a God who inflicts pain on us, we are in need of a God who will comfort us.
In the midst of our suffering, we’re not alone. We’ve not been abandoned. We do not have a God who withdraws from our pain, but we have a compassionate God who steps into the very midst of our pain and suffering to offer comfort. According to Paul, God is not the source of suffering, but the source of our comfort. He brings healing, not sickness. He restores hope, not despair. He sits on the Mercy Seat, not the Vindictiveness Seat. He breathes life, not death. He’s looking to save, not to condemn. He acts out of compassion, not oppression. He creates comfort, not torture.
The popular Footprints poem has the speaker addressing God as they walk along the beach. Much of the walk the speaker notices the two sets of footprints, side by side, but also noted times of only one set. Those, he noticed, usually occurred when he was at very low points in his life. Inquiring of God, he sought insight and answers as to why God abandoned him, especially when he needed him the most. God’s answer reassured the man’s faith. No, God never left him nor forsook him. Only one footprint can be seen because that is when God carried the man.
God does not create the suffering, for the world has created enough pain and misery on its own. God brings comfort, as he sits with us in our suffering.
I once asked a Bible class a rhetorical question, “Who does God comfort?” No one gave me a wrong answer, they just failed to offer the best answer. Being in a church setting, they came up with answers like “fellow Christians,” or the “Church.” Their answers weren’t wrong, but they miss the point Paul is making in this passage. God does not discriminate when it comes to comforting, nor does he play favorites. He comforts people who need comforting. Anyone. Anywhere. Anyplace. If someone is suffering, God is comforting because that is who God is. We are wounded by the suffering and are in need of comfort. Thus, that is why God is praised.
Marla Hanson says we all have scars, it’s just that some can be seen and others are deeper than the skin’s surface. Experience speaks volumes and with clarity. In the mid-eighties Marla, a model and TV personality, was assaulted by two men who used razors to slice up her face. She needed a hundred stitches to mend her scars. Five months later, she was back to work with reports saying she was radiant and smiling. “Everyone has scars,” she said. “Mine show. Most people carry theirs inside themselves.”*
Scars left behind from betrayal, broken promises, death, terminal diagnoses, a bad job, false accusation tend to stock pile, and never quite heal. We carry the hurt with us until God brings his comfort. While God is not the source of suffering, he is the source for the comfort offered to us.
That is when Paul pivots saying that after God has comforted us, he does “. . . so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (v. 4). We are partners with God as we step into the ministry of comforting others. Like the children’s song says, “Love is something if we give it away,” and the kind of love we give away, in this context, is comfort. When we comfort others, that comfort acts like bread on the water and comes right back at us. God comforts us so that we can comfort others, which in turn is comforting to us.
In 1987 Lisa Najavits was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She decided to spend the summer in New York. Her dream summer quickly turned into a nightmare, when, on an early Tuesday morning in June a man with an abuse record had a fight with his wife. Frustrated and angry, fueled by a few beers, he went looking for trouble. He found Lisa and assaulted her, slashing her face with a razor to require a hundred stitches.
God had nothing to do with this attack. It was not God’s will or some morbid plan of his to inflict such harm on this woman. There was no reason beyond that evil does weed itself through this world. No, God was not the source nor the motivation behind the pain or the attack. But God may have been behind the healing.
The next morning Marla Hanson, who was pursuing a film degree from New York University at the time, visited Lisa in the hospital. Doctors could repair the wounds, but only someone like Marla could help the healing process as she draws comfort out of her own wounded-ness.* While God did not cause the pain, for neither Marla nor Lisa, God used Marla’s experience to comfort someone who had endured great suffering.
We cannot escape suffering. In a fallen world suffering feels like its woven into its very tapestry. And maybe it is. But we can counter suffering through our comforting compassion. Whether we are nurses, aids, social workers, spiritual care, volunteer coordinators, or TC’s who answer phone calls. Our compassionate engagement and sympathetic understanding allows God to work through us to bring comfort. Not self-soothing comfort like a child gets from a Snoopy, or a blanket, or a pacifier, or a thumb, but this comfort comes from God. Once we experience his comfort, we can do nothing but give him praise.
Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)
* See Rubel Shelley, Bound for the Promised Land: Walking in the Faith Footsteps of Father Abraham. Nashville: 20th Century Christian, 1988.