Compassion – The Secret to Love, Ministry and Life

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.