The Infilling and Overflow of Compassion

If we cannot receive compassion from God,

How can we be compassionate for others?

God gives generously when we ask.

Receive His compassion.

Feel forgiven.

Experience mercy.

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COMPASSION is the state of virtue that converts a miserable life into a life worth living – a life filled with abundance. This is so because compassion fills the God-shaped hole in our hearts, whether we receive it or give it. By compassion God is known and God becomes real in our being.

It is an irony of life that compassion is often enrolled abundantly within a person’s heart who has suffered; the person who has been softened by a gargantuan struggle they failed to cope with. Their reward is compassion. Later on they receive it. Indeed, even whilst they’re on the tremulous journey.

From such a struggle comes a veritable wisdom that helps the person see truly the spiritual things of life beyond those things that are more easily seen in the physical realm.

In this way, compassion must have been received in order that we may give it, and in doing so, we become purveyors of it. When we have received God’s compassion in a tangible and irrefutable way, we cannot help but fall in love with the idea of allowing the compassion of God to overflow from within us out onto and over people we know, and those we can serve.

One day at a time we can:

• Pray that God might show us what the compassion of God looks like in our own and in others’ lives.
• Gain vision of and acknowledge the struggles of people and apply any encouragement we can to them in their situations.
• Find ourselves touched by the suffering of a lost world and pray for it all the more, committing ourselves to understanding it whilst resisting the temptation to change of it what we don’t yet understand.
• Get away from our inner problems just long enough to see others and their inner problems.
• Get involved emotionally in the chasm between the bliss of heaven and the many painful realities here on earth. Our hearts should bleed for the possibilities of heaven here on earth.
• Commit ourselves to furthering our vision for the things of God we would otherwise not see, for compassion is about corrected sight.
• Want to see those who are weak in society strengthened. When we see children and the elderly and the disabled liberated within the context of their disempowerment, we will experience joy at the sight of God doing wonders in our generation.
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  Compassion must be received before it can be given, and the Lord gives copiously if only we will ask to be healed. We need it so much. Compassion is a very good sign that God is in us. When we are compassionate we are also closest to the Spirit of God.
  © 2014 S. J. Wickham.