Three Kinds of Comfort

Since graduating college – and even before – I have learned a great deal about dealing with stress. I’ve also learned that there are a whole lot of people in the world with entirely too much stress in their lives. If that description applies to you, read on! I thought I would share a few thoughts on some types of comfort that have seen me through the rough times.

Perspective

The first kind of comfort I want to discuss is the comfort of perspective.

This comfort comes when we realize that what we thought were big problems, aren’t. It’s when you remember that the test you’re stressing about won’t make a bit of difference a year from now, or that the remark you’re still bristling over doesn’t actually matter, or that all the stress that’s piled on now will eventually be over, and you’ll be stronger for it.

Perspective comforts us because it opens up new horizons that shrink our worries by comparison. They take the blinders off and allow us to breathe again, to come out of our dark rooms and remember that, after all, they are only a very small and insignificant part of the world. They do not define us, and their problems and worries do not need to define our lives.

The comfort of perspective often works hand-in-hand with compartmentalization. And compartmentalization works best when you have interests and goals outside of what you’re worried about, things like family and calling and the battle of the ages to worry about. Once you put your more minor worries in context, you’ll be able to (with practice) make them almost disappear.

But sometimes worries aren’t minor. That’s why we need the comfort of courage.

Courage

This is the pagan sort of comfort, the comfort that, at first glance, looks like despair. This comfort comes when perspective doesn’t help. When things really are ruined, when what is important really is lost and cannot be regained, when there really is no way out. Sometimes there isn’t an answer or a solution. Sometimes there’s just pain.

The comfort of courage keeps fighting anyway – not because there is a chance of winning, or a hope of rescue, but because it is the right thing to do. Because if we go down, we will go down fighting, and if this is our end, it will be glorious. It is hard to describe the feeling when you realize that nothing you do will turn this around, or make it easier, or make it better – but you do it anyway. You take a deep breath and grab onto the pain and don’t let go, making war on it and glorying in the battle.

There is a power that comes with this kind of resolve. When I’m beaten down and life just keeps kicking me in the teeth, and I make up my mind to go out and crush it anyway, not because it’ll help but because that’s who I am, I can feel my character strengthening, my power rising. It is the power of the last stand, the fatal charge, the hopeless battle. And it brings with it a strange sort of comfort – not that one will live comfortably, but that one will live well.

Even this type of comfort fails. When it is our own evil we are fighting, our own regret and shame, courage does little good. But there is another comfort. And that is the comfort of hope.

Hope

The pagans didn’t believe in happy endings. Their afterlife was always worse than this one, a shadowy remnant of living. Their gods were fallen, corrupted and quarrelsome. Their heroes fell even as they rose. Their ideals of goodness were unreachable, looking down in cold judgement.

But then Christianity revealed something new: hope.

Now, I am not talking about ordinary hope. Ordinary hope is not a comfort; it is a guess, and if the guess is wrong, it does no good. This is a different hope, a hope that passes the bounds of the world. If perspective fails, because everything that is meaningful and good in life is gone, and if courage fails, because we are broken and have not the strength to deal with the evil around and within us, if all the world is destroyed in fire and ash – this hope is untouched. The darkness will not be forever. Christianity, and Judaism before it, introduced to the pagan world the idea of the unexpected happy ending – an ending where suffering brings forth glory and death brings forth life.

Sometimes, when you’re stressed about something, you just need to learn to laugh at yourself for making mountains out of molehills and go on to the things that are really important. Sometimes you need to grit your teeth and charge into battle and feel your strength rise. And sometimes you need to remember that when we and our world have utterly failed, there is a hope that does not depend on us.

And hope does not disappoint.

“no, I’m not sad. just tired” by erix! is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0