Gracious heavenly Father,
Parent of glories beyond all human conception, and gracious host of all conceivable comfort, all thanks is due your holy name for the comfort you gave to those who may comfort those with a comfort that can only, and does only, come from you.
I pray, indeed we join our hearts together, right now, in the presence of the holy courts, with invisible angels attending, for comfort, right now, Lord; for the one who reads these words who may find a gentle healing stream instead of hard, oppressing walls. Be with that one by a Presence they can hardly determine as real, but that which is felt as an interminable reality—that you show up, drawing alongside them, coming alongside, even by a person who wears your Divine Presence—God in skin.
That one who is beside themselves in grief, in an anguish incomprehensible, in the numb, in the anxious one, in the one who is affronted by a spiritual depression beyond all reconciliation—that one strewn on a raft on the sea of disappointment and betrayal. God, may your glory rest on that one. God, may they sense you holding their hand, your holy hug, your warmth inside them as their heart is met by the world with coldness.
To the one who is just barely holding on, with fingernails determined to hold on through gritted teeth. To the one overwhelmed by familial conflict. To the one driven downward and silenced. To the one who has been conditioned to be oppressed. Freedom for some, relief for others, and a breakthrough for others again, but mostly for a sustaining belief that you are there by your comfort; by a Presence that is the Holy Spirit.
To the one who has been maligned, who has experienced a maddening betrayal, who has borne the burden and cost for months or years—and heaven help them now if it is decades—who wears the identify of impairment for the grief struck into their heart; grant them, Lord, their hope for healing; for more of what they had never even hoped to receive. Make something meaningful out of the purpose of their testimony.
To the one who has by life a condition that resembles war, met them in the depths of their experience, Lord, and remind them by some pleasant human beings that in their stepping out their journey—in trepidation and toil—they are nothing short of inspiring for what and how they endure.
You, Holy Spirit, are by definition, The Comforter, the one who comes alongside; the paraclete. By holy deference, make the pain we feel the very resonating gateway that would take us all the way into the Holy of Holies—Jesus himself. Make our pain the very vehicle of our salvation. Bring us to your saving grace through the oddest grief; to show us it was at the end of our power, the end of ourselves, that you entered to scoop us up from these dregs of experience. That indeed there was the brightest hope in darkest despair.
Great and glorious are you, God, who comes to save us in our travailing; when all else we trusted in failed, that you came through by a comfort we received when we held out our hand to you.
Great and glorious are you, God.
AMEN.
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