God Never Forgets. God's People Will Find Comfort

The Advent word for the day is comfort. It's a hard one for me. As I anticipated, as I dreaded, the meditation in the devotional book, Waiting and Watching, told a touching mother/child story.

Mother/child comfort stories poke at a hole in my heart. My own mother wasn't into that style of mothering. Oh, she had her moments, but her Advent words would be encourage, strengthen, and You heard the doctor, it's psychological, so get back to school.

I had to search for a comfort story this morning. This is what I found:

A number of years ago I served a congregation eighty miles from my home. I made the drive twice a week. I was on my way to Bible study one Wednesday winter morning after a big snow. The two-lane highway was plowed, and things were melting. But at a low point on the road and on a slight curve, I hit a piece of black ice. The car veered. I continued in the same direction, only now in the wrong lane, and with no control whatsoever, no brakes, no steering, no escaping the lane with an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the hill at me.

Now I grew up near the mountains and learned to drive in winter. I knew how to regain control of a car on ice. In particular, I knew the cardinal rule: DO NOT SLAM THE BRAKES. But all the tricks to regain control were not working. And that eighteen-wheeler had nowhere to go but where it was heading, straight toward me, speeding toward it. 

I didn't care where the car would go. The only place I didn't want it to go was where it was already going. I SLAMMED THE BRAKES.

The car spun around. The rear of the car slammed into a three foot bank of snow in a ditch on my side of the road. Safe. There wasn't even any torque. My seat back absorbed the full impact of my body.

A passing highway patrol car watched the whole thing, stopped immediately, and within twenty minutes, the tow truck had pulled my undamaged car out of the ditch. The patrolman said the roads were better further south, and I'd probably be fine driving on to my destination.

But I wasn't fine. I sat in the car, paralyzed by indecision. I called the church. Marilyn answered the phone. I said,

"I don't know what to do. If I were ten years younger, I'd simply drive on to Bible study. If I were ten years older, I'd turn around, go home, make a cup of hot chocolate, and pull up the covers."

Marilyn was ten years older. She said, 

"Turn around, go home, make a cup of hot chocolate, and pull up the covers."

Which is what I did.

Not all of us have those mother/child comfort stories. For some of us, Mother/God images disturbing, different from how Father/God images are disturbing, but maybe at an even deeper level.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God is the passage for today. But Isaiah knows. Later he says, Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Here's the thing. There is more than one way. God has this system in place with multiple levels of failsafe. A highway patrolman, a tow truck driver, a cup of cocoa, a voice on the other end of the telephone. God never forgets. God will comfort.