Stop asking “Why me?” Start asking “Who for?”
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 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 Corinthians 1:3-4)
Fannie Lou Hamer had gone from sharecropper to civil rights activist. But on June 9, 1963, that decision almost cost her her life.
Hamer and some fellow activists were on a bus heading home when they stopped for food in Winona, Mississippi. The restaurant unlawfully refused them service. Instead, the police inside the restaurant unjustly arrested Hamer and four of her coworkers.
Hamer was shocked. “Why was I arrested?” she asked. The officers responded with jeers and racial slurs as they drove past the city jail and straight to the county jail. Out there, Hamer realized, “Wasn’t nobody gon’ hear us.”
Once at the jail, the officers shoved four of the five women into cell blocks, keeping one of the activists, June Johnson, with them. From her cell, Hamer couldn’t see what they were doing, but she could certainly hear it. Johnson, Hamer knew, was only fifteen years old.
Eventually, the officers came for Hamer. “We gon’ make you wish you was dead,” one said. Hamer was forced to lie face down on a thin cot while the officers beat her. When the attack finally ended, her body was swollen and hard. “I couldn’t set down,” Hamer said. “I would scream. It hurted me to set down.”
But despite her own trauma, Hamer turned her attention away from her own pain and toward the pain of her coworkers. She recited Scripture to the young women who sat bloodied and bruised on the prison floor and sang this hymn until they fell asleep:
Walk with me, Lord!
Walk with me!
Walk with me, Lord!
Walk with me!
While I’m on, Lord, this pilgrim journey,
I need Jesus to walk with me.
Hamer’s comfort of her friends in that prison cell is a remarkable picture of what Paul calls us to in today’s passage: to turn comfort received into comfort given.
It’s not necessarily wrong to ask “Why me?” when you encounter a trial at work. But a far better and more biblical question is “Who for?” God is with us in every trial, walking with us and comforting us, so that we are free to be a comfort to others experiencing similar pain.
With today’s passage and Hamer’s example in mind, let me encourage you to do three things today.
- Name a hardship you have experienced at work that is now, by God’s grace, in the rearview mirror.
- Think of somebody who is going through a similar hardship right now.
- Send that person a text or email right now, offering to get together to listen, comfort, and help.
You and I aren’t called to solve every problem. But we are called to comfort as God has comforted us. Respond in obedience today.
