An idea originally introduced by Finley Peter Dunne and taken up by many journalists as a sort of unofficial slogan is “The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” It might be hard to say whether any newspaper has fully lived up to that credo, but I do believe that it is a fairly accurate description of the Holy Ghost’s role in our lives. The Savior promised His disciples that when He left, He would give them a comforter. “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.” (John 14:16-18). We are promised that if we make and keep our baptismal covenants, then we may have the Holy Ghost to be with us as a constant companion. If the primary role of the Holy Ghost is as a Comforter, and if we are promised that we may have and in fact are encouraged to seek out the Constant Companionship of the Holy Ghost, then the logical conclusion is that we will be in need of almost constant comforting, which means that if we choose to honor our covenants with the Lord, then we will essentially be in a nearly constant state of discomfort. This life is hard. Every second of it. And if we feel comfortable, then it probably means that we are past feeling and numb and blind to the pain and suffering that is out in the world around us, and the pain and suffering that may be scabbed over inside our own hearts. If we are truly living in a way that invites the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost, then He will make sure our eyes are open. He will make it impossible for us to see our neighbor wounded and bleeding on the side of the road and feel that passing by on the other side is acceptable. He will have us climbing on top of a house and breaking open the roof to help lower our friend into the loving arms of our Savior. We will love and serve people who aren’t ready to receive our help, or are not receptive to our invitations to change their lives for the better. We will follow the counsel of the living prophets and be hated and reviled and persecuted by the world. As we seek to live worthy to have the Holy Ghost as our constant companion, we will not be comfortable. We will be afflicted and we will have our hearts broken and we will be in over our heads and we will feel the urge to panic or lash out or just give up already. But Christ will not leave us comfortless. We cannot often be comfortable as we follow Him, but we will never be comfortless when we have the Comforter dwelling in our hearts. Some may argue that it would be better if we never felt pain to begin with and thus would never need any comforting in the first place. But without our pain and afflictions, we would never have the opportunity to have the Comforter for our companion, and would never learn from Him the things that we can only get after having suffered and then afterwards being comforted. I hope that we can all commit to being neither comfortless nor comfortable, but rather comforted constantly by the Comforter who will abide with us forever.
