“Comfort, comfort ye, My people.”
Providing care is a top priority during The Holiday.
Find out why by watching our Truth in Two (full text below).
Open your hearts to empty hands during this season, and every season.
Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), teaches at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).
Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat, scop.io
FULL TEXT
During the holidays, I encourage my Christian brothers and sisters toward more sensitivity. Our care for people should display an honest feeling, an affection, an emotional attachment to the person who suffers. We may not understand the plight of that person. Proverbs 14 confirms “no one knows another’s bitterness.” Seeing folks in emotional pain, should produce such sensitivity for their suffering, that we internally, physically feel it. One of the key Greek words for compassion means to suffer along with someone, literally, “in one’s bowels.” When we are compassionate, we feel another’s pain.
Our sensitivity, then, may take the form of tears. We are told to “weep with those who weep” according to Romans 12. Our response to another’s suffering should be that of the good Samaritan who “felt compassion,” the story tells us in Luke 10. The father in the prodigal son parable, found in Luke 15, was “filled with compassion,” as we should be. “Opening our hearts” to people shows compassion, but those who are insensitive have “closed hearts” Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 6. People who are compassion-less, have literally “closed their bowels,” the word we use for “constipation.” Jesus’ story of the king who showed compassion to his servant, who owed the king money, is contrasted with that same insensitive servant who was showed no mercy, toward another, who owed him, according to Matthew 18.
To my Christian brothers and sisters I say, be sensitive during the holiday season, during every season. “Put on feelings of tender compassion and kindness” Paul says in Colossians 3. People in pain, who are emotionally exhausted, are in need of your support.
For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found.