Giving comfort to those in need of comfort

"O Lord, my heart is exceedingly sorrowful; wilt thou comfort my soul in Christ. O Lord, wilt thou grant unto me that I may have strength, that I may suffer with patience these afflictions which shall come upon me, because of the iniquity of this people." Alma 31:31

In my very first area, serving in the Holladay North and Olympus Stakes, I had occasion to meet a young woman who had grown up in the LDS Church but had fallen away almost as soon as she had left the nest, going straightway from Rome to Vegas, so to speak. Some years later she chanced to get a glimpse of her lie from the outside and decided that she needed to put it back in order.

Meeting with the missionaries was one part of her journey back, and I was fortunate enough to work with her for almost the entire time that she received lessons from us. In that time we also received some insights from her. On one occasion she told us of when she had come to work and found that her schedule had been changed without her knowledge: she would be starting an hour later that day than she thought. Because of her tight budget she decided to stay rather than go home and come back later.

While waiting for her shift to start she sat outside on a bench. Shortly thereafter a homeless man sat down beside her and began to talk. There wasn't much direction to it: He would talk about his current problems, then his childhood, then again to something else. And she listened, and she responded with words of comfort, with whatever she could give, and that she responded at all was comfort to him, to know that someone was listening for the first time in so long.

And she realized that she was acting as a proxy for Christ at that moment, that she was His hands there. We are all prodigals and sojourners from our eternal Home, but it wasn't until she related that story and her realized that I grasped that image in my mind and realized, myself, an aspect of His mission and how to follow Him in this aspect. Sometimes, to lift a burden, you just need to listen.

Your turn: When have you had opportunity to help someone with something little and only later realized how much they needed it?