March 17, 2019

They have proved a comfort to me.
—Colossians 4:11

The word comfort in our text is interesting.46 This is the only place where it occurs in the New Testament. The term is our English word paregoric. Now, paregoric, in Greek just as in English, is medicine.
Paregoric is a medicine that mitigates or alleviates pain. And what could be more delightful than the thought that there are men and women who are like that—they mitigate or alleviate our pain. Pain is one of the conditions of our being, something nobody escapes. All life is rich in pain—the pain of striving, the pain of being baffled, the pain of loneliness and incompleteness, the pain of being misunderstood.
People add to that pain, sometimes without meaning it. How often is the pain of life increased by those who mean well. But who has not numbered in his or her list of friends somebody whose Christlike ministry has been to alleviate pain? Such people were the apostle’s paregoric. Such are the paregoric of us all—often humble people, not in the least distinguished and not at all conspicuous for intellect—yet somehow in the wear and tear of life, amid its crosses and its sorrows, mitigating and alleviating pain.
You can be a comfort to another though you never know anything about it. Just as the finest influence we exercise is often that of which we are unconscious, so the greatest comfort that we bring is often the comfort we know nothing of—not our preaching nor our words of cheer, but the way in which we bear ourselves in life when the burden is heavy and the sky is black. Let men or women behave gallantly, and behave so because they trust in God, when life is difficult, when things go wrong, when health is failing, when the grave is opened, and though they may never hear a whisper of it, there are others who are thanking God for them. Every sorrow borne in simple faith is helping others bear their sorrows. Every burden victoriously carried is helping men and women to be braver. Every cross, anxiety, foreboding, shining with the serenity of trust, comes like light to those who sit in darkness. Dear friend, if you walk in light and love, you are a comfort when you never know it. And other people, writing their letters, will put your name in, to your intense surprise, and say, “You were a comfort to me.”
—George H. Morrison