Leadership Thought: The Move that Every Christian Should Make.

Dear Friends,

Compassion, someone wrote, “Is your hurt in my heart.” It has been described another way writer and speaker Frederick Buechner who once said, “Compassion is that somewhat fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never be any joy and peace for me until there is joy and peace for you as well.”

Compassion may be found in prayer as you have often prayed when you learned of someone’s special need. It is often expressed in your tears, but it is most clearly and most meaningfully revealed in your time. Compassion expresses itself in many forms  like taking food, babysitting, providing resources, visiting the hospital, forgiving a debt.  Compassion has many faces, but  behind each one is a heart that says until you have joy and peace, I will not have joy and peace.

Jesus was the Master of Compassion. Wherever He went, He had a way of identifying with the hurts of the people he met, but it never stopped with just His feeling for them. He did something with His feelings. Many of us can be sympathetic and say, “I am sorry,” but compassion “feels and whispers I will help.”

Many have been the times I have felt sympathy, but unlike Jesus I didn’t translate that sympathy into compassion, and I am the lesser for it. Repeatedly in Matthew’s gospel we read of Jesus seeing,  feeling, and responding to needs. Again and again we read that Jesus “was moved with compassion” (9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 22:34. The Greek word for compassion means to “suffer with” which implies that  Jesus cared so much for others that their pain physically affected Him. It’s as if He almost retched because he was so deeply concerned.

You and I need to pray that we would see the world through the eyes of Christ, and that our “hearts would be broken by the things that break the heart of God.”

When I think of compassion, I am reminded of a heart wrenching story that is a sad lesson of the consequences of an unfeeling heart.

The phone rang in a high society Boston home. On the other end of the line was a son who had just returned from Viet Nam and was calling from California. His folks were the cocktail- party circuit kind- with wife swapping, gambling and all the other things that go with it. The boy said to his mother, “I just called to tell you that I wanted to bring a buddy home with me. “ His mother said, “Sure, bring him along for a few days.” “But, mother, there is something you need to know about this boy. One leg is gone, one arm is gone, one eye is gone, and his face is quite disfigured. Is it all right if I bring him home?”

His mother said, “Bring him home for a few days.” The son said, “ You don’t understand me, mother. I want to bring him home to live with us.  The mother began to make all kinds of excuses about embarrassment and what people would think…and then the phone clicked.

A few hours later the police called from California to Boston. He mother picked up the phone again. The police sergeant at the other end of the line, said, “We just found a boy with one arm, one leg, one eye, and a mangled face, who has just killed himself with a shot in the head. The identification papers on the body says he is your son.” (Taken from Rebuild Your Life, by Dale Galloway).

Enough said!

May God help each one of us to be just a little more compassionate this day and this week, and this month, and this year, and………………

Yours striving to be moved by the things that moved the heart of the Master.

Yours in faith and friendship,

Tom