Compassion

This is not the story about my adventure last week. And this is not the story about how the best planned adventures can go awry. Nor is it the story about how that same adventure left me with a black eye, bruised shoulder, and scarred knee. No, this is a story about compassion and how God is revealed in the kind words and gestures of a stranger.

The first day or two after this "adventure," my bruises had not appeared. I was moving a little slowly, but I looked normal. By the third day, I had a serious black eye, the kind that made me look like I went 10 rounds with a prize fighter and lost. But there were groceries to buy, life to be lived, and work to be done. So my black eye and I went about our usual business.

People stared, as I knew that they would. Some strangers asked what happened. I got to relive, in the most humorous way, my adventure involving a hike, a fall, and a boat. (But that is a story for another day). Some people looked at me and immediately looked away, equal parts pity and condescension. There were looks that made me feel ashamed and embarrassed for daring to appear in public with such visible bruises.

But standing on the long line at the grocery store, I encountered one woman who looked at me with a heartfelt compassion I could sense through my very being. She looked me straight in the eye and asked if I was okay. I assured her that I was, but I was grateful for her asking. She didn't say anything else, but lightly touched my shoulder and smiled. I saw her again, in the parking lot, when she walked up to me and slipped me a piece of paper with her name and number. If I needed help, she said, please call.

This gesture left me in tears in my car. Tears of gratitude that I was not a woman who had been battered by brutal hands, but merely a clumsy woman who had tripped and fallen. Tears of sorrow for this stranger, whose story I do not know, but who offered me such compassion seemingly borne out of experience. Tears of repentance, as I think of all the times I should have intervened, stopped, helped, pressed, when confronted with injury or pain or bruises - of both the physical and spiritual kind.

Compassion, real compassion, is a risk. You reveal something of yourself in a compassionate act, something of your own pain, something of your own life experience. To act with compassion is to risk being rejected, or being wrong, but willing to show care, concern, and love even toward a stranger. To act with compassion is to understand that one day you may be the Good Samaritan, but that the next day you may easily be the one left for dead on the side of the road. To act with compassion is to demonstrate God's grace in tangible form. May we all go and do likewise, even if its just an email, a phone call, or a note of concern pressed into someone's hand.

© Yolanda Pierce