Compassion

I preached on Sunday about Jesus having compassion and that it comes from your guts. I'm sure I laughed numerous times today...I always do, but there's was no laughter tonight as I watched one of our members who is on hospice struggle. She's not at home where she would like to die. She's at a rehab center, having just been transferred from the hospital. There was a delay in getting her meds and she was in extreme pain and my guts hurt for her. When I read this first thing this morning--"The person who shuns the bitter moments of friends will be an outsider at their celebrations."--I had no idea how bitter those moments could be.

I read these too...
"It's criminal to ignore a neighbor in need, but compassion for the poor—what a blessing!"
"When you're kind to the poor, you honor God."
...but immediately thought of the Famine and kids around the world, not one of our 79 year old members.

Compassion for the poor (in health) didn't feel like a blessing tonight. I hope God was honored. At Soup, Song, Story, and Sacrament, we talked about Luther's answer to what daily bread entails: "Everything that nourishes our body and meets its needs, such as: Food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, yard, fields, cattle, money, possessions, a devout spouse, devout children, devout employees, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors and other things like these."

I normally do four visits a week. I did four today. Each time I serve communion, we pray the Lord's Prayer together. Give US this day OUR daily bread. How come everyone doesn't have "everything that nourishes our body and meets its needs"? God, we're begging you, "Give US this day OUR daily bread!"

I leave you with the descriptions of the Noomas we will watch on Saturday and next Wednesday:
RICH
There's a popular bumper sticker that reads "God Bless America," but hasn't America already been blessed? It's easy for us to fall into a mindset of viewing "our" world as "the" world, because it's all we generally see. We're constantly bombarded with images of the latest styles and models of everything, and it can easily leave us feeling like what we have isn't enough because we see people that have even more than us. But how does what we have compare to what most people in the world have? Maybe what we have is enough; maybe it's more than enough. Maybe God has blessed us with everything we have so we can bliss and give to others.

TREES
We want to know why we are here. If our lives really matter. How our religion is relevant to this life. Today. We want to understand what significance this minute, hour, week, month, and year has to our lives. To our world. We need a God who cares about this life, in this world, right now. We want to understand why everything we think, everything we say, and everything we do matters. We don't want to just sit back and wait for something to happen or someday to come. We want to know if all the choices we make now will shape our world and lives for eternity. Because we want our lives to have meaning today, and our lives today to have meaning forever.

Thanks for being on this journey with me.