My cousin, Sarah, saw my apprehension and made a promise: “I’ll stand here and watch him the whole time,” she said, “I won’t take my eyes off him.”
We were standing over the small form of my 22-month-old son, Luke, who lay unconscious in a hospital bed in the pediatric intensive care unit. A fat plastic tube ran into his mouth and his chest rose and fell with the measured pace of the ventilator. Luke was sedated after a long seizure that required several doses of sedative to stop. Now the seizure was over, but Luke remained in medically-induced sleep while waiting for an MRI to scan his tricky brain.
But all had not been peaceful. Luke burned through the short-acting sedative and woke thrashing, flailing, and pulling at his ventilator tube. Nothing prepares a mother to watch her child thrash in panic. I hovered over his bed, jumping at every twitch, ready to pounce on his nurse if he showed signs of awakening. I kept vigil all night.
That was how Sarah found me: bleary-eyed and a little paranoid. She encouraged me to rest on the cold vinyl couch under the window. “I’ll stand here and watch him the whole time,” she said, “I won’t take my eyes off him.”
And she did. She leaned against the wall near my child’s bed and watched him, only the reassuring bleep of medical monitors to break the silence.
My cousin knew just what I needed because she, too, once stood over the bed of her own son who was fighting cancer.
For a time, she carried my burden.
She was moved by compassion.
Compassion is an interesting word in the Bible.
In the Old Testament, a few different words are translated as “compassion” in the New King James Version.
Chamal (Hebrew) means to pity, spare, have compassion on, just as pharaoh’s daughter had compassion on baby Moses.
Racham (Hebrew) can also be interpreted as mercy, pity and love, especially where it concerns God turning away His anger and sparing His children.
Rachuwm (Hebrew) is used only to speak of God Himself, and means full of compassion. It’s not just that He has the ability to be compassionate, or acts with compassion, but He is consumed by it, overflowing with it.
But when we get to the New Testament, translated into Greek, we see a new word: splagchnizomai. Moved with compassion. It actually refers to the bowels, which Hebrews believed was the seat of tender emotions like love and compassion.
In the Greek, the meaning is stronger, more like “gut wrenching” or “deeply moved.” Nowadays, we say our hearts were moved with compassion. But in Jesus’s time, they felt compassion in the guts. It’s a strong word.
Every time the gospel writers say Jesus was “moved with compassion”, they use this word splagchnizomai. Jesus also uses this gut-wrencher in the parable of the prodigal son. Here’s a son who didn’t turn out the way his father raised him. This son actually asked for his inheritance while his father was still alive.
One Jewish author, in his book Walking the Bible, wrote about his journeys through the Holy Land where he visited ancient biblical sites. In one of his stops, he asked the locals what it would mean to them if their sons asked for their inheritance while the father was still alive. They were horrified. To ask for the inheritance before the father had died was akin to wishing that the father was dead!
How many of us could bring ourselves to wish our parents were dead? Not wicked parents, not abusive parents, but loving, decent, godly parents? Yet this prodigal son took his inheritance and went off to drink, eat, entertain worthless friends, and womanize. He ruined his life with sinful living and wasted his father’s gift. Starving and homeless, this Jewish boy was reduced to feeding pigs. Yet when he returns home, his father is moved with compassion, splagchnizomai, even while the pathetic young man was still far away. All it took was a glimpse. His father took in his child’s sorry state and was moved with compassion. And equally moved with joy. His child, who the father had every reason to believe he would never see again, was in his father’s arms.
When Jesus was moved with compassion, He acted. He touched the leprous man and healed him. He laid hands on the blind men and opened their eyes to the world. He saw the hungry, weary crowds who thirsted for His words and hungered for His healing, and He fed them.
Compassion is the active cousin of sympathy. Sympathy feels, but compassion does. (This isn’t my original idea; I heard it somewhere and I wish I could credit the author.)
Jesus didn’t feel sympathy, which looks like this: “I feel bad for them. All those people came out in the middle of nowhere and listened to Me all day. Now they’re hungry. I hope they can find something in the villages. Oh well.”
Praise God that the compassion of Jesus did more than just wish us well. Sympathy feels, but Jesus did. Healed. Fed. Taught. These are action verbs and they can teach us about the role of compassion in our lives.
What can we do in our daily lives to do compassion toward others? Here’s where I get tripped up: compassion is often seen as an act of kindness toward a needy stranger, like giving a few dollars to the homeless veteran outside Wal Mart. Hit and run compassion is deeply important, but we’re missing out if we’re only looking for big opportunities to help.
Compassion is administered daily. And most of the time, it’s poured out on the people we interact with every day: Husbands, children, parents, the mom on the next park bench, the cashier at the convenience store, the police officer who just gave you a ticket for talking on your cell phone.
I like to call it practical compassion.
Even Jesus practiced compassion on the people He interacted with in His daily ministry. He didn’t zoom off to Rome to find a blind man to heal – He healed the one who came to Him as He walked the roads of Israel. He didn’t knock on doors in Cairo to tell women about the living water – He talked with the woman who came to the well where He rested. We’ll never run out of opportunities to show practical compassion right where we are.
How can we pour compassion out in the ordinary moments? Here are a few ideas:
- Prepare a special treat for your husband because it’s been a tough week.
- Go to your son’s school and give him a big hug when you parted on bad terms before he got on the bus.
- Write a note and stuff it with a few dollars and leave it for someone to find. Pray for God to bless and save that person. Then have fun guessing who might’ve picked up your little gift.
- Listen longer than you want to when Talkative Terry needs a sympathetic ear.
- When you give your pocket change to a person in need, ask her name.
- Invite your single relatives or friends who need a friend for dinner, Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yes, it’s an act of compassion to welcome (and cook for) that many people.
- Forgive.
- Respond to crankiness with understanding. There’s often a suffering heart behind the whiny mouth and it’s the heart we’re trying to reach.
- Clean the kitchen and straighten the living room to create peace and sanctuary for yourself and your family. Creating a peaceful home when you can all relax and unburden yourself is compassionate.
Whenever we practice compassion, we exercise our hearts and strengthen our spirits to be more like Jesus. Jesus’s disciple, and witness to the Lord’s compassion, Peter wrote:
Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous; not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing. (1 Peter 3:8-9)
Our gracious God formed our hearts not only to love and serve others with compassion, but to be blessed by our obedience. When we bless others, we are blessed ourselves. God’s mercies are forever, they are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23). Blessed are we to go, to do, and to give with compassion.