The love which is God brings comfort, for comfort is not exactly ease; it is strength. The word itself is a combination of the Latin "con," meaning "with" and "fortare," meaning "to strengthen," so it literally means to have what it takes to be strengthened. If you are comforted, you have strength enough to bear whatever you must bear because an omnipotent God bears it with you.

Writing out of personal experience Mary Lewis Coakley tells her husband Bill's story and her own. She describes the powerful effect of faith and prayer on her life: the four and a half years of her husband's illness (when at first there seemed to be little chance of his living or growing in health and gradually through love and miracles he did respond and grow better), the trauma of his death, and her acceptance of widowhood and subsequent adjustment.

Mary Lewis Coakley, who lives in Philadelphia, has a distinguished writing career: among the many books she has written are Mister Music Maker, Fitting God into the Picture, Our Child-God's Child, and Rated X: The Moral Case against TV.