"Deep Awareness Of The Suffering Of Another Coupled With The Wish To Relieve It"

I believe that when we begin to understand compassion, then we begin to fully understand Jesus’ command to love God and to love our neighbor as our selves. When we begin to understand compassion, we begin to understand that God has called us to have compassion on people, not just circumstances, and when we have compassion on people then we want people to live as healthy, whole, free, God-loving, Christ-serving individuals. I believe that when we begin to understand compassion, then we stop seeing the world as us-against-them but instead as us—we—common humanity—created in God’s image and called good. And when we believe that each of us was created in God’s image and loved by God, then we begin to see all persons as those worthy of dignity and respect…and human exploitation does not treat people with dignity and respect. Therefore, we must stop it—not because we feel sorry for people—but because it is our call as compassionate followers of Christ.

Now…while I believe we should be compassionate toward people because they are people, I don’t believe that we all have to become involved in every cause known to humankind. I believe that God gives us passions and desires and that those passions and desires, coupled with life experience, guide us to where we can most effectively serve. For instance, in our office, we realized that the subject of human exploitation was too much for one person to tackle, so we broke up the areas into manageable chunks. One person focuses on sex trafficking; another on labor; another on bullying; another on pornography; and another on media and natural resource exploitation. It’s actually kind neat. When we asked everyone what they’d be most interested in working with, everyone chose something different based off of where they were in life, what they had experienced, and what they knew they could handle.

So today, some of you may be feeling an extreme amount of compassion toward people who have been bullied because you have been bullied. Some of you may feel compassion toward those who have a pornography addiction because you have one, too. Some of you may have extreme compassion for persons being hurt by land or media exploitation because you have felt the effects. And some of you may have compassion for persons involved in trafficking…because you understand the root issues and don’t ever want anyone to be held by force, fraud, or coercion. It’s okay if you’re not drawn to all of these issues. It’s okay if you’re not drawn to any! You could have extreme compassion for persons affected by poverty, those in prison, widows, the homeless, those suffering from mental illness…the list could go on. The thing is…we must do something about the compassion we feel because compassion without action is just empathy. And empathy may be fine for some things…but for others, we must act. We must act where we feel most passionate. We must act with passion. We must live with compassion.

What are some ways you can show compassion to those affected by human exploitation? Not ways you can feel sorry for people…or ways that you can feel good about helping people…but real, honest to goodness things that you can DO because you see persons as persons created in God’s image—because you want to do everything you can to redeem God’s creation and give people the chance to live wholly and freely in and with Christ?

[Blogger's Note: Two weeks ago today, I posted, “From Hyper-Functioning to Compassion.” Last Thursday, I posted, “Me and Valentine’s Day.” Both were excerpts from a talk that I gave to collegiate students on February 4th. My assignment for that talk was to talk about compassion (definition and biblical examples) and to tie it to my work with human exploitation. This excerpt was my attempt to put it all together.]