How can I be a neighbor?

While our senior pastor was in India, one of my co-workers preached a sermon that I am still thinking about. I'd like to share some of his thoughts along with a great story. I want to see this attitude reproduced in the lives of our students that we have the privilege of serving.

"How can one be a neighbor? How do we (I) meet need with God’s love?

When it comes to the large issues like poverty, generational homelessness, hunger, human pain and suffering because of war, injustice, inequality, prejudice and crime we often cry out in despair. Despair because the problems are too big and we are too small to do anything about them. The problems and enormous and many and we are only one.

Senator Mark Hatfield tells of his day in 1974 with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India.
“As my family and I toured Calcutta with Mother Teresa, we visited the orphanage filled with crippled children, the co-called “House of Dying,” where the sick and diseased are cared for in their last days, and the dispensary, where the poor line up by the hundreds to receive badly needed basic medical attention. Mother Teresa ministered to these people, feeding and nursing the sick and elderly, loving them when others had left them to die. I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the suffering and the utter impossibility of the tasks to which Mother Teresa and her coworkers face daily. ‘How can you bear the load without being crushed by the impossibility of the task?”

My dear Senator,” replied Mother Teresa, “I am not called to be successful; I am called to be faithful.”

Faithful compassion: “when Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them….” (Mt. 9:36).

Not pity – compassion.

For pity weeps and walks away,
Compassion comes to help and stay.

Pity is an emotional response; compassion is an action response.

Pity touches on feelings; compassion engages our will.

Pity often produces the tears that help us keep a safe distance from another’s problems; compassion provides a bridge that helps us move from our own background and experiences to embrace the hurts and cares of another.

Pity understands that there are hundreds of million severely malnourished children in our world; compassion recognizes the opportunity we have to live with a little less so others might live.

Pity rails against the injustice of discrimination; compassion alters life-styles in order to focus personal resources which can be used in caring for disadvantages people.

Pity observes human suffering; compassion suffers with those who suffer."

Can you imagine this generation what this generation of students could do in the world if they cared more about being faithful than successful? Maybe even more profound would be to imagine us, the adults in their lives, caring more about being faithful than being successful!

Rich's sermon - PDF, Word