Going All the Way
Compassion is an interesting thing. It comes straight from the heart and yet the actions we take are not from the heart but from the mind.
When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat." But he answered them, "You give them something to eat." - Mark 6:35-37
In today's Gospel reading, the disciples want to send the people home out of compassion for them.
Jesus, however, has a deeper compassion that is not limited or filtered by reason. He states what should be the obvious, and yet it seems outrageous.
Feed them.
How?
We can dismiss this command as an intro to a miracle and totally miss the point, I think. Jesus is telling us to go all the way with our compassion. Don't just empathize, do something.
That is what I think it means to follow Jesus. Use our brains to come up with answers; don't let our minds convince us there are none.
I encountered a situation this week that helped me see how I make assumptions about what can and cannot be done, and I have my grandson to thank.
Matthew will turn fourteen in May, but if age was determined by how active the brain is, he would be far older.
He approached me with a desire to build or invent something to help convert pollution into energy, reversing global warming. His ideas are not small. Each way he proposed to do this, though, had problems that I could clearly see, though he could not.
I felt like the disciples questioning Jesus. "Are we to go buy enough loaves for them to eat?"
How do we know we cannot do the impossible unless we try?
My grandson's innovative mind is challenging me to be open to the impossible or improbable. So what if he wants to defy the laws of physics? Maybe he can.
All I know is I want to be on the journey with him. When Jesus was his age, his parents found him in the Temple yard teaching. Maybe I can be open to learning from a child as well.
So, the message, I think, is to go all the way, to listen to the voices of reason that keep us from moving ahead, but not to let them stop us.
All things are possible if we believe.
I believe.
More to come...