Suffering and the Eternal Recompense of Compassion

It can be a tired and worn cliché, that God wastes none of our pain. We wheel it out at our earliest inconvenience, when we are stricken with the awkwardness of being presented with a case of someone else’s suffering, hardly realising the damage we may cause.

There is, however, the weight of eternity in genuine loss
that calls us to cry out to heaven above.

How on earth are we supposed to genuinely implore God without having precious things ripped from our covetous grasp? This is not the reason we experience loss, but it is God’s open-door invitation to venture eternally amid such loss.

Could I proffer an opinion based on the theology of experience?

Could it well be that we have no idea about the significance of life and eternity until we have suffered?

Could it be that the urgent hope of life is that our lives would be swept away?

Only when we completely lose our lives do we have the opportunity of gaining eternity. This I liken to a revenant experience. And without wanting to sound superior, there is something that only those who have suffered can gain.

It opens our eyes to what is just beyond our comfortably convenient and oftentimes luxurious world. I say just beyond, because it is literally over the cusp of the moment. It is in the offing for anyone who lives and breathes. Those who don’t know this, oh what a shocking, life-ending reality.

I can tell you I had no idea until I was 36 years, one month, and 19 days old. With one life gone, a new life emerged. And life truly hasn’t been the same ever since. For the losses I bore, there were gains that could not have been realised otherwise. From a shallow and immature perspective, having been brought to my knees for the first time in my life, I suddenly realised my life was not my own. That is true for every single one of us, yet we hardly realise this. Think about how tenuous the living breath is!

You and I live by the graciousness of God alone,
whether we recognise this or not.

God gives and God takes away.
Such is life.

I discovered as I was taken over the precipice and into the abyss of loss that I was truly nothing without it. All of me that had substance was being wrought out of the twisted metal of my disaster. How incredible it was to realise that nothing I had within me amounted to anything without God. With everything stripped away, I could finally see a clear and level site from which to build the foundations of a life made for God’s inhabitation.

These last few paragraphs have possibly nauseated some sense of reason from within you. I want to use the rest of the article to connect suffering with compassion.

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What has always mystified me
is that suffering is linked to compassion.

Both words — suffering and compassion — derive from the same root (pass-/pati-), in Latin and English and Greek, and possibly other languages. There is a definite linkage between the two.

The person who has no compassion has not suffered, which is not to say they haven’t experienced pain. To truly suffer is to submit to it, without denying it or reviling it, but to have truly been crushed by it. There are many in life who may go one way or the other in avoiding it, into some form of resistance away from where growth in compassion beckons.

But the person who is lambasted by the loss, floored by what has them floundering, the person who is weak beyond resistance, stands to find the God of compassion amid their turmoil and despair. Of course, they usually need to tap into the compassion of another, but not always.

What they lose is incalculable, and so what they gain, as a measure of God’s generous and compensatory grace, is an eternal weight of glory that is poured into their life, in the quality of compassion that transcends this life and connects with the Ages.

This compassion comes to bear
in a presence they carry about
within them, that they exude.

We encounter in them a true and rich and real person. They are no threat to anyone, and they cannot be threatened, but the fearful are threatened by such a person, because they have an intangible eternal magnanimity about them that is from a worldly sense impossible to reconcile.

Look at the person with compassion and make a study of them. Where have they suffered? How has suffering deepened their perspective of life? Why has suffering unearthed such compassion?

Having suffered,
you know what suffering involves,
how much it has cost you,
yet, how much you have gained,
and, in sum, how it then connects you
with compassion, which connects you with others.

Compassion is the gift given to those who have suffered.
And compassion is the embodiment of Jesus.

Photo by J W on Unsplash