More From Hadassah Treu

When I wrote my meditation “More Than a Mother” about God’s comfort, I was in the middle of one of the hardest years of my life. This was a time of deep grief and pain following the biggest tragedy I had experienced—the unexpected death of my husband, my closest person, partner, and best friend. With his loss, I lost my family and my home in the beautiful country of Austria. I felt God’s call to come back to my country of origin, Bulgaria, and start my new life as a widow there.

At the time of writing my meditation, I was in the chains of grief. I wrote in the meditation how I experienced God’s comfort on one particularly heavy day that stretched me to my utmost limits. But this was just a day. I am so thankful that the Lord truly has shown himself in my life as “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 Cor. 1:3-4, NIV).

Every morning, I would pray for God’s love and mercy to fill all my voids and cover the painful places in my heart. Every day, God had a word for me, a special message that assured me God saw me, heard me, and knew what I was going through. I learned how to come to God with my pain and bring it to the cross along with my burning questions, doubts, and the mixture of sadness, anger, and hopelessness.

I slowly began trusting the Lord again for restoration and healing. I believed God was able and wanted to heal me and that I would again experience joy. Day by day, the Holy Spirit worked in the wounded places of my heart, healing, restoring, and rebuilding. In 2023, I suddenly discovered that I had more good days and moments than bad ones and that joy and hope had invaded my heart, flooding it with light. The pain receded, and the memories were not just sources of pain, but sources of gratitude and joy too.

I believed and believe that God is the God of all comfort — the God of complete and eternal comfort. But what does God’s comfort mean?

There are three key components to the comfort God gives us: strength, hope, and help. We need strength to endure the pain. We need hope to keep going and trust that we will see good in our lives. And we need help. This could be a practical help to solve an overwhelming problem, help to see things from another perspective, or help to heal.

Our God is a Comforter. In every moment and every situation, we have the best Comforter by our side who is perfectly able to give us consolation, strength, hope, and wise counsel.

Today I am no longer dreading the future. Instead, I move forward, eagerly expecting all the good things the Lord has prepared for me. God has truly comforted me; God looked with compassion at all my ruins; God made my deserts like Eden, my wastelands like the garden of the LORD (see Isa. 51:3).