People have it within them when they are born, and it never leaves at any time during the
lifespan. This is the desire to understand and apply the self-discerned or
God-revealed secret to life; to live life acceptably according to one’s
personal perception of how to make one’s life happy and successful. And where
there is love to guide that process, there is a journey along the pathway of
God, whether the person sees God is integral to their journey or not.
We see it as our mission to
discover the secret of life, never contemplating that God has preordained it,
simply and wonderfully, in the concept of compassion.
The only trouble with attaining
compassion that will transform our lives for the best is that compassion isn’t generally
learned or assimilated into a character until we have been through a fiery
furnace of significant and tumultuous pain.
The secret to love, ministry, and
life is the acquisition of compassion.
When we have been tried through
grief, and we didn’t resist that pain through blaming God or others, and we
didn’t blame ourselves, but we just knelt there absorbing the pain the best we
could, suddenly compassion effused through us.
As we knelt there, not knowing
what to do or where to run or how to respond, God met us, there.
There, where we were beyond
despair, in a land of nothingness, yet able to remain, God did something. Invisibly
and miraculously we were brought instantly to the capacities and fulfilment for
love, known by compassion, which is warmth, glazed and cauterised in a hopeful
and honest vulnerability. Of course, we know not how this process takes place;
the softening of our souls. But we willingly thank God for this compensation we
could not have previously hoped to encounter.
As we knelt there, betwixt and
between, yet blaming no one, just experiencing the hopelessness, breathing in
and out and thinking consciously, yet not running, it happened.
God came. He came, but we hardly
saw him come. But we know he came because of what we have experienced – the softening
of our character in love and the swift evaporation of fear. We have become no threat
to ourselves or anyone. Suddenly we realise we no longer need to change
ourselves or anyone. We accept that God is in charge of that.
Compassion has done wonderful
things. And it is because of pain. And now we see the purpose in it – that terrible
thing that occurred. Compassion is the very thing that has brought us close to
God and able to love others even as we love ourselves as we always wanted to,
but never could.
© 2014 S. J. Wickham.
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