Week 53: Compassion is Your pain in My Heart

“Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him.” (Mark 1:41)

“You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” (Luke 6:36)

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” (Unknown)

“What you have learned from this relief work trip?” asked Chong Sock Lee, my team leader, on the last night at Japan. There are dozens of lessons I’ve learned, but only few I wrote on the paper. One of it I verbalized during our Malaysian team debriefing;

“I have learned to see people in a difference way. Everyone have their own story of joy and pain. Daily we rub shoulders with the ‘walking wounded’, it just we don’t know… sometime we don’t care enough. When I see the tsunami victims, I felt compassion for them.” (not exactly my dialog but the point is true)

For Christians, to have compassion is to become the healing presence of Christ to others.  Compassion means feeling with and for others. Compassion drives us to extending mercy and helping others in a practical ways. Ronald A. Beers writes “Compassion is a tearing of the heart, a true caring, a quality deeply seated in your emotions that inspires you respond to another person in need.” Compassion as I see it is feelings back up by actions.

During school time in chemistry class, Madam Wee, (or Madam Wong, I don’t remember) our teacher teaches us how to identify/ differentiate between acidic and alkaline liquid by using litmus paper. So it is with your level of compassion. It is a litmus test of your commitment and desire to love others as Christ loves you. To be Christlike is to showed compassion to the social outcasts, crowds, beggars, women, foreigners, the hungry, the poor, the grieving, the physically impaired, the mental deranged and the culturally marginalized.

If when you see people in need and it doesn’t move your heart to have compassion for them, you may have developed a deathly spiritual decease called – a heart of stone. Overtime when Christ’s love doesn’t reside in you, eventually your heart become too hard to respond to others or even God.

Keep company with Jesus. Showing his compassion whether or not it is received or recognized, learn to have a love that keeps no record of wrongs, becoming a source of comfort and encouragement to others, loving others not just in word but in deed and in truth, sharing your resources and time, noticing those who are in needs, etc. Have compassion, practice compassion and be compassionate!

Adele Ahlberg Calhoun suggests few more practices to develop the heart of compassion;

·         Seeking to heal wounds rather than react to the wounded

·         Showing mercy rather than passing judgment

·         Reading the newspaper or listening to the news as a call to prayer and compassion

·         Volunteering for some form of community-based service of compassion

·         Visiting those who are sick, hospitalized, unable to drive and attending to their needs and desires with patient love.

I have to repeat this: Compassion is the desire to become the healing presence of Christ to others. It is our choices that will reveal whether the Christian today becomes known as a well-spring of compassion or a group of religious people who are not really care for others.

THINK BIG What would Jesus do? (WWJD)

START SMALL See, Feel, Act and Pray

GO DEEP Jesus said, “I have compassion for these people.” (Matthew 15:32)

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 References:

a)      Spiritual Disciplines handbook: Practice that Transform Us by Adele Ahlberg © 2005 by InterVarsity Press.

b)      Divine Moments: Everyday Inspiration from God’s Word by Ronald A. Beers and Amy E. Mason © 2008 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.