Ben Wilson, LPC

Compassion is more than you think it is. Sure, it is seeing the commercials with the starving children and sending them our dollars. And yes, it is being willing to listen to a coworker describe her upcoming ordeal with a bilateral mastectomy due to her family history of losing multiple family members at an extraordinarily young age to cancer and feeling the tears well up behind my concerned countenance. While both of these are very real examples of compassion in this world, they are only a part of what compassion really is.

Compassion ultimately means 'to suffer with’. Every trial that we undergo, every thorn that we endure, every mess that we’ve made…there is Someone who can’t help but find Himself with us in the midst of all that causes pain and suffering. He doesn’t have to be there. It is because of His grace for us that He chooses to be there. Remember yesterday’s post…The Lord your God is with you…He is there, he is with you. But He
is there not necessarily to take away the pain, but to sit with you in it. He is there not entirely to smooth the suffering, but to shoulder the burden, feeling the mass of the boulder that some days feels like it buries. He is there to pour Grace, offering us what we don’t deserve. As the adulteress, I couldn’t understand why God would want to sit with me in my pain. I made this mess, how could He want to be with me in it? I couldn’t understand why He would lift a finger to lighten my load when I was the one who had caused the avalanche slide of rocks that buried my soul under their rubble. One word…Grace.

It is all Grace.