Daily Devotional: Healing & Wholeness: Healed to Help

This is an opinion column.

MADE WHOLE

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”
2 Corinthians 1:3-4

REFLECTION

There is a woman in almost every congregation who has been through something genuinely terrible and come out the other side with a quality that is hard to describe but impossible to miss. She does not offer easy answers. She does not rush past the hard parts. She sits with people in pain in a way that makes them feel less alone, because she has been in the same dark room and she knows where the walls are.

That quality did not come from a seminar. It came from suffering that was brought to God and transformed. Paul calls it the comfort we ourselves receive from God, and he makes clear that it was never meant to stay with us. It was meant to flow through us. The healing we receive becomes the resource we offer. Our story of being held in the hard place becomes the testimony that holds someone else.

• The person who has walked through grief becomes the one who can sit with a grieving friend without trying to fix it.
• The person who has fought addiction becomes the one who can speak to someone just beginning that fight with authority and compassion no one else can offer.
• The person who has survived the thing they thought would end them becomes the living proof that survival is possible.

Your wound, brought to God and healed by God, does not just benefit you. It becomes a gift to the people around you who are walking through something similar and need someone who actually knows what it feels like. This does not mean your pain was good or that God caused it. It means God is the kind of Redeemer who wastes nothing, not even the worst chapters of our stories.

Who in your life right now is walking through something that your own history of pain and healing uniquely equips you to speak into, and what is keeping you from offering what you have received?

PRAYER

Father of compassion, thank You that the comfort You have given us was never meant to stop with us. You have brought us through things that felt unsurvivable, and You did not do that only for our benefit. You did it so that we could sit with others in their unsurvivable moments and be the living proof that You show up. Show us today who needs the comfort we have received. Give us the courage to share our story when it is exactly what someone else needs to hear. Let our healing flow outward. Amen.