Compassion...

ZZ

Joel Olsteen:

Certainly, when God created us, He put His supernatural love in all of our hearts. He's placed in you the potential to have a kind, caring, gentle, loving spirit. Because you are created in God's image, you have the moral capacity to experience God's compassion in your heart.

This is a beautiful idea. This is a beautiful truth.

"...you have the moral capacity to experience God's compassion in your heart."

Beautiful.

Now, if I may, I'm going to reword this sentence to give you a different perspective.

Because you are created in God's image, you have the moral capacity to experience God's heartache.

com·pas·sion
–noun

1. a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.


Can you truly imagine having the moral capacity to experience God's compassion? I mean really; can you imagine God's heartache. Would you even want to? It's in the fibers of our being to experience this compassion. That feeling in your stomach when you stop and acknowledge the world just isn't right. When kids around the world are dying of hunger; there's heartache. When you're given free will and you deny your maker; there's heartache. When you walk by someone in need without giving it a second thought; there's heartache.

Can you imagine having a bad day and you just want to go home and get away from it all?

And this is where you lay your head at night to get rest. There's heartache.

Can you imagine the trials you would face daily if you were homeless and almost blind. If almost twenty years ago someone broke into your home and beat you to a bloody pulp leaving you for dead. They beat your face in so badly that the neighbor that found you could hardly recognize you and it leaves you blind in one eye. But no worries, you get social security and disability that's just enough to not afford to live in your own home. Do you have compassion?

Donny Sockwell

Can you imagine being diabetic since the age of 15 and now you're 32, homeless and six months ago you had to have your leg amputated because of your diabetes? You used to live with your cousin and her 3 teenagers in a small home and she passed away last week due to complications from a hysterectomy. Now you sleep on the streets as you wait your turn on the list for housing. Compassionate yet? Feeling any heartache?

Alicia

Can you imagine shopping for your clothes out of the back of a truck?

And be thankful for it.

Can you imagine the drugs controlling you when you used to say you had control?

Can you imagine a world without compassion? A world filled with people that have compassion running through their veins that are just to busy. Hard to imagine huh?

Can you imagine a man coming to realize how good God is to him and he sees all the grace and mercy that God is pouring down on him and he struggles with that new found reality and the world that surrounds him? Being torn between the two worlds. What he's known and what he now sees. And when you look into his eyes you can see in his soul that he desperately wants to see more of what he's seen. He wants to understand. He acknowledges this powerful force in his life. He's totally freaked out by God's presence. And it's a good, beautiful thing.

Compassion is a good thing but it's married to heartache.

Rob Bell puts it like this in his book Sex God:

"The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying "Me Too." This can transform our experience of heartbreak. Instead of being something that distances us from God, causing us to question, " Where are you?".........This is the God that holds out his hands and asks, "Would you like to see the holes where the nails went? Would that help?" It's the place we find out we're not alone, where we find the strength to go on. Not a strength that comes from within ourselves but a strength that comes from God. The God who keeps going. Who keeps offering. Who keeps loving. Who keeps risking."

Will you risk heartache to be compassionate?

Will you risk being compassionate to experience what God made you to be?

Just a thought.

Britney & Scottie