A little while back, I heard a pastor speak on missions. It was all about sharing the good news of Jesus and how every Christian can and should play a role in that. I confess that, for the past few years, my real opinion of God was so low that I thought it would be better if I didn’t speak for him – I wasn’t sure if I could say anything nice.

But I kept listening, trying to keep an open mind. Maybe this guy will help me get past some stuck spots and I’ll be able to ask people what they think of Jesus, right? It can’t hurt to bring him up in a conversation, if I can manage to have a good attitude about it. But then he started getting really emphatic. I mean, he was 100% sure that this was the most important thing that Christians can do, and he tried to drive the point home in some bold ways. “It’s more important than this; it’s more important than that.” Typical preaching material, right?

Yep, typical stuff you hear in a church. But one statement he made really threw me, and he kept saying it over and over: “God doesn’t care about your comfort.”

God doesn’t care about my comfort?

*trigger trigger trigger*

Is that true?!?

I happened to be listening to the sermon in the car. I recall that wasn’t the safest place to get triggered like that.

Past theological training, if I could have recalled it, was meaningless in that moment – all I could feel or think about was being abused. My abuser didn’t care about my comfort, either. In fact, I think he specifically enjoyed driving home the same point: my comfort didn’t matter. Abuse is about having power over another human being, after all.

In the minds of my abusers, their desires were all that mattered; I didn’t have any needs that were worth their attention. Was God like that, too? Is God an evil warload, manipulating human beings for his personal glory, exploiting them for the sake of his raging egomania? This was precisely the picture that this pastor was painting for me, whether he knew it or not. For a short time, it seemed plausible – and the universe was a scary place to be!

Comfort was a basic need that I found when I started healing. Come to think of it, comfort was something that I felt God himself showed me was a basic ingredient to life, and it helped stabilize me after the onset of PTSD.

The pastor was saying that sharing about Jesus was a way to give God the honor and glory he deserves, and gives God what he deserves was more important than our little concerns. In his words, God was concerned with his glory and he wouldn’t compromise it for our comfort.

It took me a few days to make sense of it. I kept thinking, thinking…searching for a safe harbor. Does God care about me at all?

But God is good, right? People say so, and so does the bible. How can he be good if he doesn’t care about the fair and basic needs of human beings? What kind of goodness is that?

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 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. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV)

Yay!!! Phew.

*heart rate returns to normal; headache subsides*

God is “the God of all comfort”. That means that his character DEMANDS that he prioritize comfort for his people somewhere along with his other priorities. Based on this passage, comfort is God’s solution to affliction (awesome! I’m on board with this.). Because both his glory and our comfort are priorities, he can’t abandon either one. He won’t compromise his glory to provide us comfort, but he won’t seek his own glory at the expense of our comfort. Neither option is congruent with who he is.

Ok so pastor-guy sounded far too black and white. What I heard was a (false) dichotomy between the gospel and comfort for hurting people. It left me scrambling to identify the difference between the God of the bible and an evil warlord in a 90’s action movie.

True Lies comes to mind. Wasn’t that a good one? Wait…that was a terrorist. Different dynamic. But I’m sure I saw one with warlords around that time.

Sorry, off-topic!

Perhaps the real problem is that “Christianese” (the language of the American Christian subculture) generally relates “comfort” to “comfortable” and “easy,” and connects it to the soul-deadening and socially acceptable addictions of our day. If you look at it in this light, it’s understandable that the pastor was so emphatic against it.

For someone who is in affliction, however, comfort means consolation, and it restores life and hope to the soul. It’s like cool water found in the hot desert, and there’s no substitute for it. It’s needed so badly at such a fundamental level that it’s a difficult climb for a sexual abuse survivor to even feel safe enough to receive it.

The Lord taught me over time that true comfort is what I needed, and it took this awful healing process to tear my soul open to receive it. When I heard the pastor repeating those words, “God doesn’t care about your comfort,” I felt like I was being sent back into the desert without water and without hope.

God DOES care about my comfort. A whole lot, in fact. He put himself on the line to make sure I get it.