Tag: Compassion

Perfect Prayer is Bathed in Tears

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God saves every tear we have ever, and will ever, shed.  He has angels save them in bottles, or wineskins, if you read the King James Version.

Why?  When we finally meet Jesus in heaven, one of the things we might do (I don’t really know) is go see this storehouse of our tears, our prayers, our lives.  It will all be recorded, but somehow washed into a perfect clean by Christ’s death on our account.

When the old order passes away, we will have no more tears, no more pain, no more crying.  The way we hurt each other is the old order, and we won’t do that anymore.  There won’t be anyone verbally digging at us to score points.  No jokes that insult a group of people, or single out the different.

I can’t wait.

I know some friends, just today, that found out more of the unfairness of life.  As they cry and pray and search, take a lesson.  Because their prayers are made perfect in weakness.

Finding God on TV

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So, it was my turn to teach the high school Wednesday night program last night.  My topic was, and will be again on Sunday, learning to be compassionate and merciful and loving to the people of our tribe.  See the post titled Los Misericordiosos for that whole story.

Yeah, so I was racking my brain to find a perfect movie clip to illustrate my point about caring for people; noticing when they need us, ya know.  The Jesus movie, with Jeremy Sisto, was a home run.  I was sure of it.  It would still be great actually, because of the part when Jesus notices Mary Magdalene (Debra Messing) and asks her if she wants to come along.  Ok, well I couldn’t get the DVR/computer/TV to copy the clip right.  I moved on to Schindler’s List, the part where Liam Neeson (Schindler) is upset with himself for not being more careful with his money because he could have saved more Jews. Another home run.  But, upon further review, to do the entire Holocaust and Steven Speilberg’s retelling of it takes more than a four minute clip.

So, God, who we know has a sense of humor, showed me the perfect story while I was watching my favorite show – The Biggest Loser.  Yes, God is part of The Biggest Loser.  Coleen was sad that she only lost a few pounds on the show her trainer, Jillian just practically cried because she knew Coleen would be disappointed and probably voted off the show.  THAT is compassion. 

ABC (or whatever network it is on; I just DVR it and watch it later) pays her a LOT of money to train the contestants and help them lose weight.  She wouldn’t have to get invested in these people, after all, it has been six seasons, so ya win some, ya lose some, right?

Then at the end Coleen is pleading her case to stay on the ranch, and she is just totally at the mercy of the rest of the contestants.  All she had was, ‘please let me stay here’. 

I appreciate God’s message; find people who you care about and SHARE THEIR PAIN.  Sometimes that’s all that matters.

Los Misericordiosos

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Yeah, it’s Spanish.  It means a combination of compassionate, merciful, charitable, grace-ful (as in full of grace), humane, even pious.  But all those words in English don’t reach me.  All of those words, to me, have other stuff associated with them.  Like Compassion International, charitable giving as a tax deduction, graceful swans or ballet dancers or “Days of Grace”, by Arthur Ashe.  Whatever king’s nickname was The Merciful, as in Ashot III the Merciful, King of Armenia.  The Humane Society.  Pious as in “holier than thou”.

The deal with hearing God in a foreign language is that all our cultural baggage is swept away, flicked off, denuded.  Music counts as a foreign language, by the way.  God, maybe the Holy Spirit, reaches us in a cleaner way because we are not distracted.  We use a different part of our brains to process foreign languages and music, so we have a chance to be affected.  It is too easy to stay insulated when we are totally in our comfort zone.  We’ve got to look PAST ourselves, SEE the miserable, and FIND A WAY to comfort them.

The Latin roots of misericordia are this:  miseri-wretched and cordia – heart.  I see that as literally having one heart with the wretched of this world.  To FEEL what THEY feel, and to suffer like they suffer.  Misericordia is to compassion/mercy as misericordioso is to compassionate/merciful. 

It means not walking by the kid getting made fun of.  It means defending a friend’s reputation when you hear someone bagging on them.  It means being NICE to that irritating kid (friend or not) who keeps bugging you about, well, anything.  It means patience when you really just want to scream. 

Treating your brother or sister as a special person, not an annoying pest.

Jesus begs us to be los Misericordiosos.