The Full Circle of Comfort

“Therefore comfort each other and edify
one another,just as you also are doing.”
1 Thessalonians 5:11 

When their son died unexpectedly, author Joseph Bayly and his wife, Mary Lou, were comforted by a poem Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote while imprisoned by Nazis. The poem was sent to them by the young woman the Bayly’s son loved and had planned to marry. Bonhoeffer had written the poem, “New Year, 1945,” for the young woman he loved just three months before he was executed. Several years ago, thirty years after Bonhoeffer’s death and twelve years after the death of Joe Bayly’s son, Joe received a letter from a young Massachusetts pastor whom he met. The pastor had been visiting a woman seriously ill in a Boston hospital over a period of time, and finally he gave the woman a copy of Bayly’s book, Heaven. The next day, the woman said that she had stayed awake late the previous night to read it, and said that she was comforted and helped by the book. Shortly afterward, the woman died. This woman, the pastor said, was Maria Von Wedemeyer-Weller, Bonhoeffer’s fiancé at the time of his imprisonment and death