Some Fresh Bread: 


Compassion

A beautiful new song by Casting Crowns, “Jesus, Friend of Sinners,” has a chorus that ends with this refrain: “Jesus, break my heart for what breaks yours.”  I sincerely believe that we will touch the hearts of more people and “win” more people to the Lord if we have a deeply compassionate heart for them, right where they are, rather than if we should have an attitude of superiority and a “know-it-all” judgmental demeanor, looking at others, as another line of that song declares, “at the end of our pointing finger!”

The word compassion: com (with) passion (from the root word meaning “suffering,” – or, by extension, “the deepest of feelings”) – Jesus had this ability to connect with people by being with them in their sufferings.  It is the same clear distinction as we find between “sympathy” – alongside of one in their ‘feelings,’ i.e. their deepest pain – and “empathy” – in(side) of their pain with them.  Let us think for a moment about this distinction.  If a person comes to me and shares the pain they are experiencing due to the suffering of their child, I could, as a brother in Christ and as a friend who cares about both parent and child, ‘feel,’ in a sense, their distress and be moved by it.  However, as a father who was held his little boy and walked the floor with him and rocked him and prayed for him for hours on end as he screamed with the agony of a double ear infection which he could not escape, and who only knew sleep from exhaustion, a father who cried out to God to please deliver his little boy from his suffering, who even vainly cried out for the Father to allow him to bear his child’s pain, if He would only please deliver that precious child from his, I could truly empathize with the parent and his/her child.  You see, these precious ones who came to the Master were His children, for as their Creator, they were His own.  Jesus, then, had the ability to “step into” their pain and to suffer with them.  That is empathy; that is true Compassion!

Our next post: Jesus “goes the extra mile.”


A Little "Food for Thought" 

At the Feast of Ego everyone leaves hungry.

DON'T SWEAT THE PETTY THINGS AND DON'T PET THE SWEATY THINGS
 

Pun-ishment: A backward poet writes inverse. (Hmmmm . . . . .)