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.

Seminary Life Series -- Journal 1: To Live Or Die

(Reproduced from an earlier blog entry written on October 11, 2005)

I don't know about you, but at various points in my life I've found myself reflecting on this question, "Would I be willing to die for Christ?"

Today in chapel the speaker made a very intriguing point about this when he spoke on "offering our bodies as living sacrifices" in Roman 12:1-2. He said people often ask themselves (or others) if they would be willing to die for Christ. But a more profound and pertinent question to ask, in fact, is whether we would be willing to LIVE for Christ. When I first heard it, I felt it to be a bit counter-intuitive and I caught myself thinking, "Of course I would rather live than die!" But on second thought I realized the answer to that question wasn't as straightforward as I had imagined.

Certainly the notion of "dying" is frightening, but there are times when I feel so down and frustrated with things, people, or/and myself that I REALLY would rather die than live. Out of a sense of bitter devastation, I would think about asking God to simply take me away from this world so that I won't have to see and experience all the hurts and conflicts and pain that have been going on. I would imagine that if there were an occasion where I could sacrifice myself and die for Christ, I would jump at that opportunity and "get it over with", once and for all. What makes me stop this kind of negative, almost eerie thinking is the always inevitable question I must confront if I were to die at all: "Would I not feel shameful when I see Jesus?" And of course, the answer is certainly going to be "I'm pretty sure I would." That's why dying for Christ never really seems to be a viable option to me.

Yet living for Christ seems an even more daunting challenge. While to die for Christ -- on the right occasion -- could be accomplished on the spur of the moment, in a burst of courage, to live for Christ demands a life-long commitment that takes far more than just impulsive valour. It demands determination, perseverance, and discipline, among many other things. Most importantly perhaps, it demands that we deny ourselves -- our inclination to please ourselves or others rather than the Lord. When you think about it seriously, it isn't really that much easier than DYING for Christ.

But the speaker put everything in perspective with a very neat remark, "If you're not willing to live for Christ, there's no point in your dying for Christ, because your death wouldn't mean much to Christ anyway." And that's just so true. If we're not following Christ when we're alive, why even think about dying for Him?

How Far Do We Go?

"When you find something in a human face that calls out to you, not just for help but in some sense for yourself, how far do you go in answering that call, how far can you go, seeing that you have your own life to get on with as much as he has his?" (Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, 1983).

This is exactly what I felt when I was in practicum counseling clients from the under-privileged sectors, and in a way this is also what I feel most of the time in Christian communities. In fact, I suspect this is the very question that every serious believer should ask, since following Christ is, fundamentally, about giving oneself the way Christ did, and yet understandably there should be limits to the extent we give ourselves when bonding with others, not so much because Christ himself had set such limits as an example, but because in the present fallen world there will always be a need to give more, and to give unceasingly without discretion is bound to burn anybody out.

What makes it even harder, as Buechner so aptly observes, is that not only do I have a life different from yours, but we both are more than likely to be too tied up with our own lives to even try figuring out how to be of devoted profitable service to each other. Indeed, meeting the needs in someone is more than a casual inquiry after his health or the occasional offer of a helping hand; it is an intense investment of one's material, emotional, and spiritual resources. It requires us to become part of somebody's life, just as Christ became God Incarnate and dwelt among us to become part of OUR lives. As such, we literally have to turn ourselves into Christ-incarnates to the people who call out to us in need.

This is certainly a tall order. And like it or not, there will always be more people looking to have their needs met than those looking to meet the needs in others -- hence the very shrewd question posed by Buechner: How far do we go? How far can we go? This is probably something I'll need to tussle with for the rest of my life, especially when I encounter more and more peculiar cases where people barely connected with me are looking to me to have some of their deep personal needs met, oftentimes quite inappropriately or unreasonably so. At times like these, I really need to know where and how to draw the boundaries, while still being the Christ-incarnate that I am supposed to be.