Practice Love and Compassion

One of my friends at work and I were working late this week and starting talking about compassion. I shared with her about my brainchild banter blog and that I have an entire chapter in my upcoming book dedicated to that one, powerful, amazing, important word….compassion!

I decided to share a few thoughts on it this morning. I hope you are encouraged as I was when I first truly understood the word COMPASSION, and started “practicing compassion” regularly.

For example, my capacity to love my children is ENDLESS, so I understand better God’s endless love for us more clearly because of my children.

Because God has shaped my heart for my capacity to love endlessly, I trust and know that my compassion and love for others “can be” endless. Yes, I have put up boundaries, walls, road blocks, stipulations, conditions. All these barriers are based on situations, experiences, and how someone has treated me. But guess what? While barriers and walls can “protect” you from some things, those same barriers and walls can keep you from other things…. important things, and these barriers can also cause your heart, your mind, and your spirit to be “closed off”, limited, with measured capacities. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have an open heart. Besides, God doesn’t love like that. His love is boundless, endless, limitless, no restrictions, and all unconditional. His love is open-ended and shaped with an immeasurable capacity…it’s endless!!

In this sweet open, naked spot is where true compassion can rest, rule, and abide. It can take control and guide your thoughts, words, actions, and decisions. Compassion will cause you to “see through people” and their “stuff” and instead, “see their heart”, see their need, and show them love.

There are three words I always say to my children. I especially choose these words when they don’t agree with a decision or if I disagree with how they handled a situation. I preface my thoughts with this…HEAR MY HEART. When I say those words, a shift takes place in the conversation, in their posture, in their emotions. Those three words deliberately set the atmosphere for them to know…..

• This is my Mommy talking

• She knows me

• I trust her

• She know what’s best for me

• This is the woman that will move mountains for me

• This is the woman that prays for and with me

• This is my biggest supporter

When they shift their thinking, I hear and feel them and they hear and feel me, our hearts and ears are open. I am in their place, I empathize with them, I am connected to them, I love them…I want to help them solve whatever their dilemma is….that’s COMPASSION.

Having this love and compassion for my children, my family, my friends, that’s easy. What about the rest of the world???

Merriam-Webster defines compassion as “A sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”

When we were younger, as far back as I can remember, my Mother would be driving, or even walking in a store and see someone visibly less fortunate and say, “Lord help them, there but for the grace of God go me”. I always heard her say it, little did I know, she was teaching me compassion. Sometimes she would feed them, other times she would just pray for them. As I got grew older, I understood it, and have used that same principle to teach my children about compassion. All of my sibling find ourselves quoting the same thing, “there but for the GRACE of God go me”. It’s all that I know how to do. Because I’m not perfect, I don’t get it right every single time, but my heart is conditioned to be compassionate, I practice it daily.

Let God’s love flow throughout your life and together let’s release the power of compassion in our homes, our workplace, with strangers as well as friends. Even with those who are perceived as enemies…pray for them, we never know the stories or experiences that create us, but we are all here together, we all have “stuff”, and we all have the capacity to love and have compassion.

I want God to continue practice compassion daily on me, therefore, it is my desire to be more like Him. I will continue to show love and compassion daily!

I pray that the world have a more endless capacity to love, to forgive, and be compassionate towards one another.