Heat that afflicts the body is a hard teacher, but it is a teacher nonetheless. You ask that the weather be cooled so that sickness and death may not claim the weak. This is a tender and human desire, born of compassion for your neighbor. Yet hear what affliction truly works in the soul. For nothing is so favorable to philosophy as affliction. The fear of death, like a fire consuming all things besides, obliges the soul to take thought for futurity. When the body is at ease, the love of gain and bodily pleasures possess us. But let sickness or the threat of it draw near, and like clouds passing away, it leaves the judging faculty clear. Grief entering in softens the hard heart. Do you not see that what you pray against, God may be using for a far greater good than mere bodily comfort?
You pray for relief from the heat, and this is not evil in itself. But let your prayer be shaped by a higher wisdom. You look at the sky and can discern the signs of the weather. When you see a red sky, you know what the day will bring. So must you learn to discern the signs of the times. God is not merely a trafficker in worldly goods, giving a little comfort for a little prayer. What profit is it to gain a cooler day and yet lose the lesson that the scorching sun was sent to teach? The condition of suffering is not a subject for shame, but for pity and tenderness, and great is the admiration it calls for when one struggles against it and bears all thankfully. For those who are punished here, if they bear it thankfully, may put away by it many of their sins.
Therefore, do not pray only for the heat to be taken away. That sickness of the air is not the true death. To be carnally minded, thinking only of the body’s ease, that is death. But to be spiritually minded is life and peace. When you stretch out your hand to God for cooler winds, stretch it out also with almsgiving for those made sick. There is a remedy greater than a change in the weather. Were there not the relief of almsgiving, would we not lament? God has granted us power to buy off, not a temporal discomfort, but eternal death. He says, It is that life I sell thee, not the mere quenching of the sun’s rays. He gives the greater by far for the less. As you feel the heat upon your own body, let it remind you of those who lack water and shelter. Let your prayer be joined to mercy shown to them, and you will have gained a spiritual treasure far exceeding a cool breeze.
This very suffering of the natural world is a mercy of a kind, for even the robber, when brought near the judgment seat, sinks with terror and begins to philosophize. God had mercy on Epaphroditus by restoring him to health, not because being with Christ was not far better, but because his life here was still needful for the winning of souls. So too, your continued endurance in this heated world is needful for you, that you may depart to God with more exceeding riches and greater boldness. Seek not to be rid of every discomfort, for the light of Christ has shone forth in the midst of the prevailing error of our love of ease, and has overcome it. Let your prayer then be this, that whether the sun beats down or the wind brings coolness, you and all within this city may bear it in a manner worthy of the life to come. Pour your concern not into seeking a sign of relief in the sky, but into works of mercy upon the earth.