Imagine Abundant Compassion

Imagine Abundant Compassion. 

These words hang, cast in metal, on the wall in the back of an artist's workshop in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois. (I tried to buy it, but the best she'd let me walk out of the store with was the "breathe" one pictured above) I saw them yesterday, and I've not been able to get them out of my head. Maybe it's because I've been thinking just the same thing for a while now. And to see them staring at me from the most unexpected of places, well... that's a hard message to ignore.

A dear friend of mine once asked me what I thought it meant to understand humanity. The question has been on my mind since he first posed it to me almost a year ago, but I never could come up with a good answer. That drove me crazy, so I never answered at all. Bits and pieces I understood. But I never could seem to grasp the concept all at once. It seemed too big, too complex to answer in one sentence. And, in all honesty, I was too caught up in myself to give the idea the attention it deserved.

I gleaned a greater understanding of it while traveling in Europe. I saw the kind of hunger and poverty that we never see in America. But, even then, I wanted the quick fix. My first response was the desire to patch it up and move on. Give the hungry food, give the homeless shelter, and move on to the next good deed.

That surface desire deepened to an ache a few weeks later, in Amsterdam. Standing in the Red Light District, I realized that there really is no quick fix to the suffering of the world. God wounded my heart, not for the lack of food or shelter that his people have, but the state of their hearts. In Amsterdam, for example, the real tragedy of the Red Light District is not their profession, but that their hearts do not know the love, worth, and value they have in God. The answer is not just a change of circumstance, but a change of heart.

Last week I spent a few hours talking to a friend who works with a ministry that provides low-cost housing to the homeless in Nashville. They also work to pair up the residents with volunteers who hang out with them, teach them life skills, and generally invest in them. He said that in his six years of working with the ministry, one thing has stood out: having or not having housing doesn't make any difference at all. If they cannot find a volunteer to pair with the resident, the resident almost always moves out. Without someone to give them some sort of value, without the presence of relationship, the ministry doesn't work. The residents choose to go back to the streets.

So far I've just got bits and pieces of what God is revealing to me. I have no idea what it means to really understand and love his people. I don't really know if it can be summed up in one concise thought. But it is a question that God has laid on my heart, and the more I pursue it, the deeper my heart aches for God's people. The deeper and more abundant he makes my compassion.

I remember standing in Amsterdam, feeling overwhelmed and broken and helpless. I stood in the middle of a crowded street and wept, simply because they were my beloved brothers and sisters. I wanted to run away, to wipe away my tears, to hide my face. Stay put, God said. Be broken for them.

"But I can't fix this," I said.

No, God said. But you can be broken for them. Let it make your heart soft, he said. Just watch what I do with it.

I think understanding humanity starts with compassion. And compassion? It comes from being wounded deeply.

It does what we so badly need: it awakens our souls from slumber. 

"Awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, 

And Christ will give you light." Eph 5:14

May God wound you deeply.