As a Christian, my faith is anchored in the person of Jesus, who won my heart long ago. It would be impossible to understand me without taking that into account. But sometimes my faith dims; God seems distant, his ways confounding. \u201cFaith steals upon you like dew,\u201d the poet Christian Wiman has written. \u201cSome days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxiety, ambitions, distractions.\u201d And the rising sun of grief and loss, too. Those things don\u2019t necessarily destroy faith; in some cases, for some people, they can even deepen it. But they always change it.<\/p>\n
During times of sorrow and times of tears, when it feels like we\u2019re \u201cbeing broken on the wheels of living,\u201d in the words of Thornton Wilder, there is great comfort in believing God empathizes with our suffering, having entered into suffering himself. But we also need his emissaries. We need people who see us and know us, who enter our stories. Through their compassion and love, we feel, I feel \u2014 even if only partly \u2014 God\u2019s compassion and love. That doesn\u2019t eliminate the storms from within or without. But it makes greater room for joy in the journey.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. https:\/\/t.co\/yFBPzcsHvk<\/a><\/p>\n — Mike Jopek (@mikejopek) December 24, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n