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Compassion
The new Concise Webster’s Dictionary gives two meanings for the word compassion:
a. Sorrow for the sufferings of others.
b. Pity.
In fact, compassion is the most powerful antidote or remedy for anything ungodly. Compassion is the most powerful antidote for hatred and bitterness that the human heart can find. Compassion is the way to restore love to a broken relationship.
One of the most powerful stories I’ve heard about comes from Byron Deel, College basketball coach in Nashville, Tennessee. Byron Deel grew up with an alcoholic and abusive father. Byron had two brothers and three sisters, a large family, but his dad spent the family income on alcohol and he drank and ranted and raved and threatened and hit them. And then he left them. When Byron was twelve, his father walked away from the family, and did absolutely nothing to support them. There were no child care payments, no alimony. No cards at Birthdays. No gifts at Christmas. Nothing but hardship and abandonment. No sign of compassion. No sign of regret.
It would be six years before Byron would see his dad again. Two weeks after Byron graduated from high school, his dad showed up. It was an awkward meeting. He stayed about half an hour. And then he left again, and this time there was no contact for sixteen years.
Byron admitted openly that his attitude for his dad was everything that it shouldn’t have been for a Christian. Out of the blue, Byron received a phone call that said, “Your father is in Bristol, Virginia, very sick and close to death. It would mean something to him if he could see one of his children. He has cirrhosis of the liver.” None of Byron’s brothers nor sisters lived the closest to Bristol. Byron didn’t really want to visit his father, but it seemed like he should.
Upon walking into the Intensive Care Unit and seeing the man, connected to monitors, tubes inserted into his body, surrounded by medical equipment. Something strange happened. As Byron saw his dad lying there helplessly, dying, strung about with wires and tubes and monitors and machines, all the years of hatred and anger melted away.
As Byron stood by his dad’s bedside, his dad opened his eyes and began to cry. Byron wept too. Byron spent the next two days by his sick dad’s bedside. The burdens Byron had been carrying for years were gone. Byron and his dad were able to talk, and Byron shared the gospel with his dad.
Byron was no longer bitter or estranged. The compassion of Jesus Christ had taken hold, instead of seeing himself as an abused victim full of hatred and cold of heart, he saw something else. He saw his dad through the Lord’s eyes, as a needy man who just needed Jesus Christ.
Instead of looking at that husband or wife and saying, “Why doesn’t he treat me better? Why did I ever marry such a jerk?” Look at him or her and say, “There is someone made in God’s image who is hurting more than he knows, more than she realizes. How can the Lord enable me to help.”
The good news in a nutshell is “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not parish, but may have eternal life.” John 3:16.
As we read the broad, comprehensive biblical story of God at work in the world, most of us are entirely impressed.
- It was God who spoke creation into being.
- It was God who laid the foundations of life of faith through great and definitive fathers and mothers.
Our unimpressive, very ordinary lives make us feel like outsiders to such a star-studded cast. We disqualified ourselves. We conclude that we are; somehow, “just not religious” and thus unfit to participate in the big story.
And then we turn a page and come on this small story of two widows and a farmer in their out-of-the way village.
As the story goes, Ruth, the outsider, was not born into the faith and felt no natural part of it – like many of us. But she came to find herself gathered into the story and given a role that proved critical to the way things turned out.
Scripture is a vast tapestry of God’s creating, saving, and blessing ways in this world. The great names in the plot that climates at Sinai (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses) and the great names in the sequel (Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon) can be intimidating to ordinary, random individuals: “Surely there is no way that I can have any significant part on such a stage.” But the story of the widowed, impoverished alien Ruth is proof to the contrary. Ruth is the inconsequential outsider whose life turns out to be essential for telling the complete story of God’s way among us. The unassuming ending carries the punch line: “Boaz married Ruth, she had a son Obed, Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David.”
Ruth the outsider turns out to be the great grandmother of David and the ancestor of Jesus. The Book of Ruth makes possible for each of us to understand ourselves, however ordinary or “out of it,” or irreplaceable in the full telling of God’s story.
Yes, we count - every last one of us - and what we do counts.
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