When a Comfort Verse Stops Comforting

This is the second post in our series connected to the newest season of Searching the Sacred. If you missed the first post, you can find it here.

At 40 Orchards, we sometimes talk about “pillow verses.” These are the verses people tell us to rest our heads on so we can feel better. But over time, these verses can start to feel heavy. Instead of support, they can bring pressure. Instead of comfort, they can feel like dismissal. Sometimes they land like expectations we’re supposed to meet, rather than meeting us where we actually are.

Romans 8:28. Jeremiah 29:11. Philippians 4:6. These passages that can sound warm and hopeful, and sometimes genuinely are. But life is complicated, and pain doesn’t always resolve neatly. When we’re in the middle of something real and difficult, those verses can suddenly feel less like a pillow and more like a weight we’re asked to carry.

One of the verses on our pillow verses list is Isaiah 40:31.

“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

This verse was handed to many of us in the shape of a sword. It’s the kind of thought people love to offer when you’ve already reached your limit and feel like you’re failing when you can’t “rise up” one more time. It can sound like a command to be stronger than you are, to be hopeful when you’re actually depleted, to push beyond your human limits. 

This verse has always carried layers for me (Steph). My dad loved it, in part because he loved eagles. And he loved the idea of God rescuing him. He imagined himself soaring above his struggles. But the victories he hoped for never came. He struggled until the end of his life. Those struggles made this verse feel frustrating and harmful to me. 

What do we do with a verse that promises soaring when soaring never comes?

That’s what we are exploring in this series, using the subversive words of Micah 4 as a guide. Micah 4 presents  a vision of tools of harm being turned into tools of cultivation, with swords beaten into plowshares, and spears reshaped into pruning hooks. It’s powerful to imagine violent weapons being transformed and used to tend a garden. 

What if that vision and imagery isn’t just about nations and conflicts? What if it’s also about what we do with the Scriptures we’ve inherited? How can the same texts that have been used to wound be changed into words that help us grow?

One of the things that we see at 40 Orchards is the way Scripture, even pillow verses, can change shape when they’re held in a circle of people who bring their full lives to the text. This happened a few months ago, when we read Isaiah 40 in a circle. One participant in that circle had experienced deep grief within the past year, the kind of loss that changes everything. When we reached verse 31, you could feel the tension of our collective history with it. We paused and noticed how many times it had been given to us as a way to sidestep actual pain. 

But this person didn’t force optimism. Instead, they compared the verse to Deadpool. Deadpool—of all characters. The superhero who keeps healing whether he wants to or not. The one who gets renewed again and again, sometimes against his will, sometimes to his frustration. The one who can’t simply die and be done, who keeps being pulled back into life, into the next moment, into the next breath.

We laughed the kind of knowing laughter that feels the truth of something to our bones. We recognized the burden of being renewed, and the desire to not need more strength. Suddenly the verse wasn’t floating above us like a banner of triumph. It was sitting right there in the mess of life with us, as real and gritty as the exhaustion we’d carried in.

And that’s when the Micah 4 gardening-tool moment happened. A verse that had been weaponized began to do work that felt like more tending. There was a move from spiritualized optimism to gritty honesty, from triumph to survival. I wish my dad could have been there to hear it.

The last few months of 2025 have required unexpected strength from me, and this Deadpool conversation has felt like such a gift. I return to Isaiah 40:31 not with pressure, but with relief. I don’t need to soar. I don’t need to run and not grow weary. I don’t need to muster hope. I just need the renewal that arrives in small, stubborn, unexpected ways.

That’s what happens when Scripture changes from a sword to a garden tool. It doesn’t deny the hardness of the soil—it just helps you work the ground.

Steph & Lisa