“Comfort, O comfort my people.” Isaiah 40:1

What we call “creature comfort” is not what Isaiah had in mind. Rather, Isaiah is writing to a people who had been exiled, who had lived in fear, whose future was not secure. God’s voice, articulated through the prophet, that Israel’s wilderness journey and season of suffering is over.

What would that look like? What would comfort look like in a weary, war-torn world. What would it look like in an anxious nation? What would it look like to each one of us – the promise of our collective and individual burdens being lifted?

Today, and this week, imagine the kind of deep and abiding comfort that Isaiah imagines, and then pray for it and work into that promise.

Loving God, give us a vision of true comfort, and allow us to share it with a world in need. We pray in the name of the one whose coming we await. Amen.

John Wilkinson, Pastor