thoughts on compassion

This topic deserves an eloquent post, but more likely, it will just be my thoughts dumped out. Sorry about that.

I've been thinking lately about compassion. Mikkee was telling me last night about her trip to Peru. She spent 10 days with abandoned children who are now being raised in a group home, and she came home changed. She can't stop talking about the 26 boys living in the jungle that she quickly grew to love. (Mikkee, do you mind me sharing this? Mikkee is one of my favorite people, and Asher's godmother, and I've promised an Ode to her soon, but it's been hard to write. The people closest to me always are. But I digress.) She cried as she said, "Those boys need a mother." They will not be adopted; they're too old, have been through too much. But Christian Peruvians have given them a home, an education, a future. And, under Mikkee's leadership, a church in Nashville is helping fund their efforts. It's not a perfect solution, but where would those boys be without it? On the streets of Lima, where they would most likely die trying to survive.

This conversation came on the heels of toddler church yesterday morning. Out of six children in the room, four of them have been foster children (two have been adopted out of the system, the other two are still in foster families). I was talking to one of the little boys, an 8-year-old helper who was adopted out of foster care two years ago. He's a sweet, average kid. He's the kind of little boy who doesn't usually get noticed, because he follows the rules and blends into the crowd. And he likes being a helper in toddler church. He stays with his two-year-old foster brother and plays trucks and pours juice. He was talking to me this week and I remembered that he was six when he was adopted - old enough to remember life before adoption. I kept thinking, I don't even know what has happened to this kid. I don't know what he knows. Foster care is messy, adopting an older child is messier. But this kid has a life now. He has parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents that love him. Where would he be if he hadn't been adopted? Not in toddler church, pouring juice. That much is certain.

Compassion. It's the word that kept coming up for me on our retreat. We talked about the story where Jesus feeds the five thousand. Jesus had just found out his cousin had been brutally and unjustly murdered. He wanted to be alone, but people kept following him. In that moment - in the middle of his own grief - he looked at the crowds and had compassion on them, "because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." It's easy to be compassionate when I feel good, when life is going the way I want. But to care about another's need out of a poverty of spirit, not an abundance - that can only come from God. There's nothing natural about that.

God is challenging me to be compassionate consistently, out of my poverty and out of my abundance. Once again I am reminded, as Valerie says, that Jesus came to turn the world on its ear. Not just the world - me. Thanks be to God.