Chapter Seven

Relating with Compassion

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

Gaelic proverb

In Genesis we read the story of how Joseph, beloved by his father, was betrayed by his brothers, thrown into a pit, and sold as a slave. Scripture tells us he was sold again later to a man named Potiphar and that “the LORD was with Joseph” (Gen. 39:2) and gave him success managing Potiphar’s household. Later, when Joseph was thrown into prison after Potiphar’s wife falsely accused him of trying to seduce her, God was with him again (v. 21), and the keeper of the prison put Joseph in charge of the prisoners. God gave Joseph the supernatural ability to interpret dreams, and because of this gift he gained the attention of Pharaoh. When Joseph interpreted a dream for Pharaoh that no one else had been able to decipher, Pharaoh made Joseph the second most powerful person in Egypt.

Joseph’s life is an example of God’s providential care in the extremes. Just as quickly as he was thrown into pits and prisons, he was promoted and became successful and well loved. The narrator said, “But the LORD was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor” (Gen. 39:21 ESV). “God was with him and rescued him out of all his afflictions and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh” (Acts 7:9–10 ESV).

It’s in this context that Joseph recognized his brothers when they came to Egypt to buy food because of a famine; his brothers, however, did not recognize him. He accused them of being spies and said one of them needed to stay in Egypt in prison while the others went home and returned with their youngest brother, so that Joseph would know they had been telling him the truth about who they were. Later, Joseph overheard the brothers talking, distressed and fearful that this suffering had come to them as punishment for what they had done to him.

When he first saw his youngest brother, Benjamin, Joseph was not prepared for the depth of emotion he would feel (Gen. 43:29–30). His compassion for Benjamin was so strong, he removed himself from his brothers’ presence.

In his private room, Joseph wept. When he had collected himself, he invited them to dinner and they “feasted and drank freely with him” (v. 34).

Joseph was not quite ready to reveal himself to his brothers, though. As they were getting ready to return home, he told his steward to fill their sacks with food and money and also to put his silver cup in Benjamin’s sack. After the brothers left, Joseph sent his steward after them to search for the cup. The brothers proclaimed their innocence and agreed that if the steward found the cup in one of their sacks, then the brother who had the cup would become Joseph’s slave. When the cup was found in Benjamin’s sack, the brothers were horrified to think of what it would do to their father to lose another son. When they were brought before Joseph, the oldest brother, Judah, pleaded with Joseph to let him take Benjamin’s place.

What was going through Joseph’s mind at that moment? Perhaps he was thinking, I see my mother in my younger brother’s eyes. I want to protect him. I want to know him. Or perhaps he was thinking of how his father had loved him and how painful it must have been for him to believe that Joseph was dead. And perhaps when Joseph was standing before Benjamin and his other brothers he recognized that he was fully capable of the same rotten things they had done.

While we don’t know what was going on in Joseph’s mind at the time, we do know that God’s compassion welled up within him. The gold Joseph received from his suffering with God was in becoming intimately aware of divine tenderness. And when his heart swelled in tenderness for his brothers, it forced Joseph to move into the room of decision. Would he choose to demonstrate God’s compassion and extend grace to his family, or would he choose to withhold it?

Joseph chose compassion. Unable to control his emotions any longer, he made himself known to them with loud weeping (Gen. 45:1–2). His grace and compassion united his family—a family marred by deceit, jealousy, and hatred. Joseph confirmed that God’s eternal purpose for the things he had suffered was the “saving of many lives” (50:20). Then he said and did something that could have come only from the Holy Spirit—he told his brothers not to be afraid and he would provide for them: “He reassured them and spoke kindly to them” (v. 21). It wasn’t a trite speech where he was initiating all this good to meet his abandonment needs. He did everything possible to bring his brothers close to him. Compassion holds people close.

God’s hand was on Joseph because he followed God’s ways and chose to forgive those who had hurt him. God gave him compassion, but it was up to Joseph to decide if he wanted to express it or not. That’s what the room of decision is for. Joseph is an extraordinary example of someone who related with compassion toward people who treated him despicably and wanted him dead. He was close to God, and God protected him when others sought to harm him. His compassionate response to his brothers saved them—and it saved the entire Israelite nation.1

When we come face-to-face with betrayal—as Joseph did—or hate, fear, despair, depression, or darkness, our compassionate responses can help save the next generation.

Compassion Defined

If understanding (see chapter 5) requires us to do something when a young woman is at a crossroads, then compassion pleads with us to be something, no matter if that person has hurt or disappointed us, disagrees with our theological point of view, or is someone to whom we can barely relate. Expressed compassion is the result of our having said yes to God one million times along the way. Joseph did this, and that was why he was able to choose compassion in the face of his brothers’ betrayal.

Compassion is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for what happened to a person; compassion steps into what happened. Henri Nouwen, author and Catholic priest, offered an amazing definition of compassion:

The word compassion is derived from the Latin words pati and cum, which together mean “to suffer with.” Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear and confusion and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.2

Compassion doesn’t judge how a woman found herself in an awful situation, nor does it think, I’m glad I’m not going through what she’s going through! Compassion does not analyze or criticize. It says, “I feel what you feel”; it comes alongside another person and puts itself in her place.

Why We Need Compassion

I’ve learned that in order for a person to feel safe enough to admit she’s done something wrong or is in a horrible place because of someone else’s destructiveness, she must first be treated with compassion. A woman speaks her true heart, no matter the condition, when she’s given compassion.

When the women in our lives suffer from clinical depression or the death of a loved one, we must have the compassionate heart of our heavenly Father, no matter what it costs us. When a woman says she was raped or confesses she’s in an abusive relationship, we cannot stand in judgment or indifference or shock. Such uncompassionate responses put a distance between us and make her feel far away from God.

I know several young women who are suffering from a void of a loving church community and meaningful involvement. They need other women to come alongside them, to feel what they feel, to walk in their shoes, so they can settle down into knowing God cares about them. It doesn’t help to ask them, “Well, have you checked out all the churches in the area?” These women need compassion; they need someone to ask, “What happened with your last church experience?”

When we come face-to-face with a young woman who was the victim of sex trafficking, or who is fighting cancer, or whose husband has just died and left her to support and raise two small children, we must show compassion. We must let our hearts feel deeply, cry with them as they share their stories, and listen before moving on to the next thing. We must become human. Sometimes, the best way to show compassion is to be fully present to the person’s pain. “I’m so, so sorry. What are you experiencing? Please tell me. I want to hear your heart.”

When we face despair, depression, and darkness as our young friend discovers her new baby will never walk and most likely will never talk and have a normal life, we must live out the compassion that God has given to us and not let fear keep us away. The greater the sacrifice required of us, the more God gives us his heart. The more we depend on God’s Spirit for how to respond to the people and circumstances in our lives, rather than depending on our own emotional reactions, the more compassion we are able to pour into another’s life. This is what it means to walk in the Spirit.

It is not easy to stop relying on our own hearts. It requires us to sacrifice our natural inclinations, but when we do, God pours into us the compassion of Jesus Christ and we have the potential to remove the feeling of distance between another woman and God. Compassion has the potential to shift something inside her, inviting more openness for God to come in and heal. Imagine, for a moment, how a compassionate response might affect a young woman who tells you, as one woman told me, that she has an eating disorder that preoccupies her entire inner life, reminding her constantly how she must “disappoint God.”

It doesn’t matter if you naturally feel compassion or if you are naturally uncompassionate, because God can change your heart so that it is more like his. He can give you his compassion, so that you in turn can pour it onto others. When you relate to the women in your life with the Father’s compassion, you show them his face and give them a clearer picture of who he is—tender and warm and kind. For one woman, it could mean she chooses to live her life in God. For another, it could mean throwing herself into his loving arms for the first time. For many young women, it could give them the strength, hope, and courage they need to feel safe and protected in their faith, reminding them in that moment that they are not lost but found. There’s not a circumstance on the face of this earth where God’s compassion cannot reach—nothing and no one are hidden from his sight.

Living Out the Heart of Compassion

One day last January, I received a text from a woman I care deeply about that sent my spirit spinning. She had had an affair.

A Christian who prays and is prayed for regularly, this woman is committed in her faith and loves God with all her heart. It was her deepest desire to make her marriage whole and healthy. I’d prayed for her, her family, and her children for many years. Long-distance phone calls and yearly visits kept us close. With so much emotional and spiritual investment from myself and others, I was hopeful God would move heaven and earth to bring love and joy and life to this marriage.

When I heard the situation had gone from bad to worse, despair enveloped me. A thousand feelings ran through my heart; compassion was not one of them. What I wanted to do was board a plane, drive to where she was, pack her bags, gather her children, and take her back to her husband. Instead, as soon as I read the text, I did the next thing.

Worship, Don’t Wallow

I taught my writing classes early that morning, and rather than head to the library as usual, I drove to a local church, longing for the anointed room called the sanctuary. I sat at the piano and worshiped, tears streaming down my face. I felt far away from this woman and from God. Finding it difficult to concentrate or express the depth of how I felt for her and her family and what she must have been facing, I stood up and walked over to the front pew.

With pen and paper in hand, I captured these words as they fell from heaven:

I’ve been climbing the stairs of loneliness, leading me nowhere near your loveliness,

Looking past the highest step, past the farthest star,

Staring straight into the night, worshiping from afar,

I cry out into the darkness with no answer in my heart,

Leaning further over wondering

How grief’s sadness followed me this far

But then a Voice behind me said, “Walk in this way.”

I turned my heart, I turned my soul, as the distance between us vanished to gray

I spoke your name, Jesus

The powers of darkness gone

I cried your name, Savior

The longing became my song

Hold me

Hold me close

Hold me closer, still

With the brilliance of his glory, his Presence covered my story.

Like the Father, is the Son—their holy love is making me one.

He anoints me with highest joy,

Sustains me with most powerful words

No one is like the Heir; nothing in earth or heaven compares

And now that Voice is in me saying, “All I have is yours.”

I hear all the angels singing, “Let the Holy Spirit pour.”

I spoke your name, Jesus

The powers of darkness gone

I cried your name, Savior

The longing became my song

Hold me

Hold me close.1 

Somehow when I worshiped with my heart full of grief, God filled me with compassion for my friend. I believe that his compassion for her and her broken family was so deep that he gave me words to fill the spaces where judgment or condemnation would naturally dwell. Welling up inside me was God’s tender compassion for her rather than my natural feelings of being appalled. The human heart cries out, “Hold me,” and the compassion of God’s heart does just that—it holds us to him and to one another. When I did eventually talk to my friend that day or the next, I wasn’t detached or angry or accusing. Instead, I simply listened as she talked about why she had done what she had done. I heard what she had to say without trying to fix her situation. But I would not have been able to do that if I had not first spent some time with God in worship.

Come Alongside, Not Above

The day I wrote the song and talked to my friend on the phone, I came alongside her as a compassionate soul, not a condemning woman. I listened anew as she told me her story.

As a woman who didn’t understand her own value, my friend excessively guarded her heart in relationships with some men and was foolishly vulnerable with others. She wanted unconditional love but sought it in an abusive relationship that characterized her eight-year marriage. When she got married, she knew she was compromising herself, and because she didn’t seek God for her worth, her despair only increased. She believed that through submitting to the man she had married, she would be valued and ultimately find the security she had longed for since she was a little girl. She allowed herself to be used as a sexual object, despite the lack of emotional intimacy with her husband. She allowed herself to be controlled and manipulated, simply because she was afraid to lose “love.” It was from this place of being shattered and longing for love that she sought wholeness in the arms of another man.

That day on the phone, I asked her why she had had the affair, and she said that the other man made her “feel incredibly loved and deeply valued. He heard my heart and accepted me despite my darkest confessions.” She explained how she had tried to reconcile her marriage even though she loved this man. “I left the man I loved in an attempt to reconcile my marriage only to be mentally and verbally abused; unfortunately, I stayed because I thought I deserved it.”

So there we were on the phone, steeped in the whole story with its mess and consequences, with its tangled webs and raw confessions. And somehow what started rising within me was a warm and tender compassion for this woman whose lifelong search for value had landed her in a desperate place. I felt the tenderness of God pour from my heart for my friend. Rather than cut her decisions into pieces, I saw her as a little girl longing to be valued, I wept with her as she told me stories of her abusive husband, and I became weak as she was weak, vulnerable as she was vulnerable. And then I kindly asked, “Where do we go from here?”

Feel—Don’t Be Afraid to Be Deeply Moved

What I’ve learned is that when we cry out to God from the pain of those he brings to us, he cries with us. But we need to feel, to take the time to feel deeply. When we do, compassion takes root in our character and we are transformed more into the character of God.

When this woman is in my presence and reveals her true self, I weep for her out of love for her. Isn’t that how God describes his own heart toward his people in the Scriptures? “I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them” (Hosea 11:4 ESV). Our relationship with God is always rooted in his redemptive love. He truly feels tender and loving toward us. When we take the time to feel deeply moved by another person’s suffering, we too show a tender love.

Hold On to the Helper

How can we continue staying close to others when our own perspectives blind us? When my friend first texted me about her decision to leave her marriage, my initial response was to try to put her life back together the way I thought it should look. I did not know about the abuse she had experienced; all I could see was that she was destroying her family through divorce. But if I’d done that, if I had gone into striving mode, I would have pushed her away from me. I would have put distance between us.

But because I held on to the Holy Spirit, he was able to break through my initial response and show me what was behind my reaction. As the Holy Spirit moved closer to me and formed pictures in my mind, I saw the “boulders” that kept me from being deeply touched by her story: I saw the resentment I felt about another stable family falling apart and its effect on all of us, and I pushed it aside. I saw the fear that, despite being happily married, I too might someday be vulnerable to the attentions of another man, and I pushed that boulder aside. I began to pray that God would open my heart to whatever he had for me as he revealed each boulder.

Of course, I knew my friend’s history in part, but hearing it this time, I experienced it differently. I let her story change me as I listened. I was fully engaged with her and became one with her story. All the while, I held on to the Helper. I realized that I needed to be careful not to be “god” in this woman’s life. It’s the Spirit’s place to change, to convict, to lead. My job was to come alongside.

While my friend was telling me her story, I tried to have one ear tuned in to her and what she was saying and the other to Christ and what his Spirit was telling me. As I did, he began to convict me about my self-righteous attitude. Who was I to point my finger at her for having an affair? Were my battles with control and fear sins that fell into different categories? Didn’t I seek value in projects that made me feel important? Humbled by the work God was doing in my own heart, I confessed how every day these attitudes block the compassionate heart of God in my life for another person. The Spirit showed me that each day I’m one breath away from doing something that could destroy my own family.

Sacrifice

My friend, like everyone in need of compassion, was struggling to feel Christ’s presence in her life. She knew that her decision to escape the pain of her marriage by having an affair was wrong, and her guilt created distance between her and God. By treating her with compassion instead of judgment, I was sacrificing my agenda for her life to look a certain way. It was a sacrifice for her to admit her desires were wrong. And when she did, at the lowest point, she experienced God’s compassionate love.

There’s a story about John, the gospel writer, that is well-known from the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. John pastored a small church and mentored a young man. Years later when he returned to see how his church was doing, he asked about the young man. The bishop explained that the young man had backslid and left the faith. Immediately, John requested a horse and rider to find the young man. John traveled to the town and discovered that the young man had returned to drinking and stealing. John pleaded with him to return with him. The answer was no. Finally, John fell to his knees and begged the young man to return to the faith. Unable to refuse, the young man agreed, and through John’s pastoral care, he was restored to the church and to his faith.

In this story John and the young man each had to make a sacrifice. John had to sacrifice his schedule and time to find the young man. Further, he had to sacrifice his own agenda for how he expected this young man’s life to look. Without an agenda, he was unhindered to do what mattered most: move into the room of decision and reveal the heart of God. Compassion compelled John to act.

The young man had to sacrifice his natural desire to please himself. God’s compassion as seen through John compelled him to wrench himself away from his desires. John recognized the sacrifice it took for this young man and nurtured him back to life in God.

When it comes to your relationships, you too may be asked to make a sacrifice of time or an agenda in order to give compassion. I’m not advocating for you to ignore the healthy boundaries God has taught you through the years. All of us have situations in our lives where compassion is desperately needed. I know it’s painful to invest in others and then not have anything to show for it. Or we just don’t know how to get ourselves in that woman’s presence so we can show the heart of God.

Here’s what I want you to take from this: Whenever God makes you aware of a younger woman in need of compassion, remember your years with him and worship, letting God hold you close. As he pours out his compassion on you, make the decision to pour out the last drop on the soul in need. Reassure the woman who is suffering, sacrifice your own agenda, and speak kindly to her. Your compassion for the next generation could be the “saving of many lives.”

1. To download “Hold Me Close,” go to www.pamelalau.com/song. Lyrics by Pam Lau. Music by Olivia Pothoff.