Seminary Life Series -- Journal 2: Compassion Training

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on November 16, 2005)

Every day a professor will ask for prayer requests from students before he starts the class, and such a ritual often turns out to be a highly sobering moment to me. When I hear my classmates voice their prayer requests, I will realize again and again how much pain is going on in the fallenness of this world. Every two or three days there'll be someone diagnosed with or going through treatment of cancer. Or someone simply died a sudden death. Or a family was fighting about divorce, or rebellious teens ... you name it. But what made my heart really ache was this one incident which has kind of become a landmark in my seminary life.

One day, a classmate of mine handed over her prayer request in a note to the professor before the class started. Apparently she didn't say much in the note, so the professor asked her, in front of the whole class, if she could say a bit more about her request. A silence set in. Everybody was waiting for her to speak. She heaved a heavy sign, as if to help pull herself together. Then she said in a voice just loud enough for everyone to hear, "My young daughter was molested." You could literally feel the pain contained in those five words.

No further detail was necessary, and the classroom was suddenly filled with another deadly silence. The strange thing is that the silence also embodied a sense of great empathy -- a kind of understanding of what that mother must be going through, and a compassion for the mother and child that would move us to pray for them with all our heart. That day, I prayed for the mother and child several times, and this, I must say, is rather untypical of me, considering I seldom pray that earnestly for strangers. But for some reason I find myself slowly changing. Now I'll pay more attention to the prayer requests of my classmates, and if they're going through something really traumatic I'll make a note of it and pray for them as much as I remember to. And when I see that unfortunate mother in class I'll also immediately say a quick prayer for her and her daughter, even though I never really know how things have been going with them.

I believe this is part of the compassion training that God's giving me. It's easy to be really concerned about the people I care for, but how about those who simply rub shoulders with me? Am I willing to take the time to pray about their suffering consistently? If not, why? Do they not matter to me? Do they, to God?

One aspect of spiritual maturity is to understand, accept, and act on the fact that things matter to you as long as they matter to God. And that takes compassion.