as i travel thru ThisPilgrimLand

Sickening Compassion

I have made a choice in my life.  I have made a choice to accept the place that the Lord has placed me in my life.  I can remember the day that I prayed to God that I was turning things over to Him.  I remember praying and asking God to lead me to where He wants me to go and to give me the ability to find solace in knowing that His hand is the One guiding me.  I have made that choice and I regret it none. 

By doing so, I am surrounded almost daily by people who are desperate.  They are sad, lonely, neglected, and tossed aside.  They are looked upon as the lowest of the low in society and the society we live in would rather forget such people exist than offer them a hand.  These people are told by loved ones that they must help themselves; save themselves through hard work, determination, strong-will, growing up. 

These are the people I am around every day and they are broken.  Some days it is overwhelming.  Some days some of these people leave and I am forced to bury them in my mind for I know that the chances of them dying in the near future have multiplied exponentially.  Some days, due to bad decisions and refusal to apply what they have learned, it is so hard to have compassion, to show mercy, to be there for them when they aren’t even there for themselves.  Yet, I know that these feelings have to be nothing compared to what my God feels when He looks upon a humanity that denies Him. 

They deny Him despite the many signs and wonders He has presented us.  The 93rd Psalm tells us that He even gave us the stars in Heaven for mankind to see Him.  What did we do with them?  We turned them into a way to explore and map so that we could claim more of His Earth for ourselves.  How that must make Him feel.

Just as I look at the people that God has placed around me, God has allowed me to see all of mankind through His word in the same fashion.  People, we are fallen.  We are lost and doomed save One option.  While I thank God for this wisdom and this understanding, it is so saddening to me.  It makes me want to do more, to stand on the highest mountain and scream that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Light and those who refuse to believe and trust in Him will perish.  Yet, everyday I watch people who know this truth turn away from it and walk into a future that will cause them to perish should they not return.

I read the story of Christ’s interaction with the boy who has a dumb spirit in Mark 9.  I see the plea of the father of this child to Christ as he asks the Lord to please “do anything, have compassion…” and it causes me to weep.  People are looking for this compassion everywhere and in everything, yet God has provided it to me and I want nothing more than to share it and the source of it with everyone. 

This compassion the father is seeking is one that stirs you from the inside.  The father was asking to Christ to look upon his son and to be moved on the inside.  The father was seeking the compassion that moved the bowels, the type that makes you sick when you look upon something.  I think of the St. Jude’s Hospital shows that sometimes air on television.  Who can watch those without becoming emotionally disturbed?  How can anyone look upon those sick children and not want to do something, anything to help?  Oftentimes I flip right past those because seeing those sick faces makes me physically ill  because I feel so helpless to help them, to save them, to ease their pain and the pain of those who love them.  This was the compassion the father was seeking from Christ.  He showed his son to Christ hoping that Christ’s insides would hurt, his stomach would turn, his heart would break.  Being from a people who believed that love and pity were seated in the bowels of a person, this father literally was asking Christ to find it within Himself to help his son.  Of course, Christ did so based upon the father’s belief that He could save His son.

Is this the compassion that we have?  When we think about our neighbors, our friends, our family members who have denied Christ as their Savior, do we have a sickening compassion?  Is our heart stirred, are our stomachs turned at the thought of one soul perishing or are we satisfied in knowing that we ourselves are saved?  Has the Bible not told us that those who fail to call upon His Son for salvation are destined to an eternal fate much worse than the temporary suffering of the children seen in the St. Jude fundraisers?  What is wrong with us?  How have our hearts become so hardened that even knowing the Truth we are able to temper the stirring inside of us with worldly pleasures?  How much longer will we stand by and do nothing or blow people off with advise or even worse kind words rather than truth?  May the Lord grant us all with sickening compassion that moves us to do something that makes us know that yes, we are indeed the light of the world (Matt. 5).