Compassion Sometimes Has to be Learned!

Several years ago Melinda and I were on a short vacation on the Oregon Coast. We were playing tourist, stopping at the gift shops and browsing when I came across a coffee cup that caught my attention. I collect coffee cups of special places we visit to remind me of our time there. This particular coffee cup had a picture of a group in a white water raft with the caption, “Don’t whine, just paddle!” I bought the cup because it stated my philosophy of life, “Just deal with it.”

Being a fairly young pastor, with some knowledge and less wisdom I used the coffee cup for an object lesson in a message and the saying for the title of the message. I must admit, it didn’t go over quiet as well as I had hoped. Another time I told the same group of people we were going to have revival and they could get in, get out or get run over! Some did… Probably won’t do either of those things again.

Just the other day I was impressed with the thought that compassion often has to be learned. There are some folks who are compassionate people just by nature. There are other folks, I guess I am one, whose first tendency is to say, “Just deal with it.” For those of us with that tendency compassion has to be learned and it usually is learned by being in a similar situation.
For the past four and a half weeks Melinda has been in Colorado with our daughter who just had a baby yesterday. This is the longest period of time we have been apart in the past thirty-three years, thirty-one of which we have been married. We call each other two or three times a day and text several times a day. I feel like only part of me is here and it isn’t the best part. I turn to tell her something and she isn’t there. I wonder what she is doing and if she is ok. I miss her terribly! I have come to understand, to a greater extent what it must be like to lose your spouse after years of marriage. The pain and emptiness that must be experienced. At least I can call my spouse on the phone and talk with her. I have learned a little more compassion.

My daughter called me several months ago to tell me the wonderful news that she was going to have another baby. She was so happy and excited. I wept because I was afraid of what she would have to go through to have another child. I remembered her other pregnancies and the pain and suffering she dealt with and did not want her to experience that again. I spent the past three days scared, frustrated and feeling helpless. She was in Colorado and I was in Arkansas. She was trying to have her baby and I wasn’t there, didn’t know what was happening and waiting on the word everything was alright. She had a great big baby boy and she and the baby are doing good. However, I came to feel for the moms and dads and loved ones of young men and women who are in danger, fighting for our country. Mom and dad don’t know what is happening at any given moment. They feel helpless and frustrated waiting on the word that all is well.

Compassion often has to be learned. Many years ago my wife and I went through a tough time. It lasted for about three years until finally one night I was able to spiritually break through and get the answer from God I needed for my life. As I got up from praying that night a dear Sister came to me and said that God had given her a word for me. God had allowed this to happen in my life so that I might become more compassionate toward people. I guess I am a slow learner, but I am trying.

The Bible tells us that Jesus was tempted in every point that we are tempted in. He feels compassion toward us because He understands what we are dealing with. He has felt the same pressures.

The dictionary tells us that compassion is sympathy for the suffering of others, often including a desire to help. It also tells us that sympathy is to feel someone’s pain. It is to enter into and share their feelings. Empathy on the other hand is to simply understand it, yet you remain apart from the feeling.

Matthew 9 tells of Jesus preaching and teaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God. He is healing them of every sickness and disease. Then as he looks upon the multitudes He is moved with compassion as He notices they are troubled and had no where to turn for help and direction. That word compassion used there means that the center of His emotions yearned in pity for them. He hurt for them and their lost condition.

When was the last time that our soul yearned in pity for the lost of our world? When was the last time that we looked around us and realized many of the people we brush shoulders with on a daily basis are like sheep without a shepherd, not knowing where to go for help?

Sometimes God allows us to feel helpless and maybe even lost just to try to teach us compassion. Trying to remind us that there was a time when we too were like sheep without a shepherd not knowing which way to turn.

Yesterday I listened to a young man, twenty-three years old, talk about his condition. He was born feet first. He has never experienced a feeling from his waist to his feet. He told us of the multiple surgeries he has had as doctors tried to find a way to enable him to walk. He has spent his whole life in a wheelchair. He can’t drive a car. He depends on other people for everything, literally everything. As he is sharing this with us my heart began to hurt. Then he looked up with a far away look in his eyes and said that he would give anything in the world to be able to walk, to be able to drive a car, to go to the restroom by himself. He said he would dance a jig if he felt a tingling sensation in his feet and was able to get up out of that chair!

I began to weep! I have been picking him up on my bus for months and yet not one time I had felt compassion for him. Oh I empathized with him. I thought his life would be so much better if he could walk. Yet never one time have I yearned in pity for a man who couldn’t walk. My mind went to another man in the same condition. For years he had been brought daily to the gate of the temple to beg alms. Then one day a couple of preachers came by and they were moved with compassion for him. They didn’t try to meet his financial need, they went for the greater need and God healed his body.

Jesus was moved with compassion at the need of a powerless man laying by the pool. He felt the man’s hopeless feeling of always being too late to get in the pool in time to be healed when the angel troubled the water. Jesus decided to circumvent the pool and just heal the man.
Sometimes compassion has to be learned. As we deal with the problems of our everyday lives we need to ask God to help us to learn from that problem that we might be moved with compassion for others. We often quote the passage in Romans eight. I wonder if the good that Paul is talking about, is compassion? “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” (VS 28) His purpose is that we would become like Him. He was moved with compassion.

I need to ask myself where I would be if someone had said they didn’t have time for idiots and left me struggling like a sheep without a shepherd. Thank God some have had compassion on me. Go ahead and whine a bit if you need to and I will try and paddle for you. Compassion can be learned.

Just a Thought! God Bless…