We are shaped by our compassion as it serves to shape our love . Disposition of compassion name and in-form the kind of people we can become as practitioners of compassion. As Christians we are called to love one another as God loved us. God loves us with compassion - with a faithful presence, with the willingness to suffer with us, and with the refusal to let suffering have the last word. God's compassion was and is enfleshed in the life of Jesus Christ, who suffered as a body. In Christ, God suffers with us indignantly, and in every moment of our suffering God offers the unique power and promise of Beauty. This Beauty is the mysterious way that God always offers the possibility of life renewed. In God, nothing is lost; even the wreckage of life is reweaved back into who we can become. God's compassion offers the efficacy of Beauty, even as our pain and suffering are truly acknowledged. God's compassion is infinitely patient and uniquely powerful. "In God nothing is lost." Wow. I must remember that for myself but also for the ones I see who can only see that they are left out or have done things that leave them out or are seen as people who must be left out simply because of who they are and what they have done. "In God nothing is lost." This is not another way of saying we can go about life as we would usually walk through it - turned-in-on-ourselves. Rather, God is always able to find us and secure us and hold us and make us into something more than the broken people we so readily become when we are filled with fear and anxiety. "In God nothing is lost." That is a gracious move - almost too much to absorb. And yet, that is where the Good News always takes us even when we try to turn it into something else. There is always "the possibility of life renewed" - always. Obviously, it doesn't sound like beauty. How can wreckage become beauty? Then I recall some pieces of art that are amazing because of the trauma or brokenness that preceded the end product - that is now wonderfully beautiful. Connection: Nothing is lost because the one who forms us from the beginning of time is still forming us and taking us and making us God's own. Some days that may seem completely impossible. Gather us as one, O God, that we may see the beauty that you already see within the diversity of your people. Amen. |
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