"Tell me about one situation where you have shown a person God's love and compassion."
Upon pondering my response to this prompt, I found myself stumped. After thinking for awhile, my mind blank, I did what I'm good at doing: I deferred the question to a friend.
With the wisdom that is typical of this friend, she simply said, "I would speak to a time when I showed God's love and compassion to myself."
"That's a good idea," I said, "I hadn't thought about that. And I can do that. But I'd still like to think of a time when I showed God's love and compassion to someone else."
Her response, written so quickly and easily, blessed me tremendously: "You could write about me then :). Because you do that quite frequently for me.
Somehow, the fact that I've shown God's love and compassion without intentionally trying to do so is a beautiful and humbling thing to me. It's what I desire to do more than anything, yes, but I didn't know I was actually doing it! Her words encourage me to keep being me and challenge me to remember that my life is impacting others' lives--whether the impact is good or bad. Thankfully, in this friend's case, the impact has been good. Unfortunately, in other cases, the impact has not...
Which is when I've learned to show myself God's love and compassion. I won't go into all of the details of the past few years of my life, but I will say this: Before I began seeing my counselor, I showed myself very little love or compassion and held myself to such a high standard of skewed perfection that it was virtually impossible for me to be content OR to be content with others. I was good at pretending to be a lot of things that I was not, and loving and compassionate toward myself was one of those things.
As such, I believe that the single most loving and compassionate act that I ever did for myself (and everyone I have ever loved or will love) was asking for help--admitting that I couldn't keep pretending to have everything together when really I did not--realizing that I was not alone--embracing the fact that we're all part of a common humanity that is in this life together--and allowing God to help transform me into the woman that I was created to be.
What about you?
What is a situation where you have shown a person God's love and compassion?
Or, quite selfishly, what is a situation where I have shown YOU the same?
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