Quotes About Compassion

Ungrace causes cracks to fissure open between mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, between scientists, and prisoners, and tribes, and races. Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That's what the body of Christ means.

instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offences willingly, comfort the afflicted, pray for the living and the dead.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus' love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace.

All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

Lord, if you can't make me thin, then make my friends look fat," humorist Erma Bombeck once prayed.

by denying forgiveness to others, we are in effect determining them unworthy of God's forgiveness, and thus so are we.

The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.

How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.

As a counterbalance to the list of seven deadly sins, the church in the Middle Ages came up with a list of seven works of mercy: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the homeless, visit the sick, ransom the captive, bury the dead.

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus' sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

no one offers the name of a philosopher when I ask the question, "Who helped you most?" Most often they answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whenever needed, who listened more than talked, who didn't keep glancing down at a watch, who hugged and touched, and cried.

The world starves for grace.

I can never figure out how to have a friendly conversation with someone when my main point is that they are going to Hell.

How can Christians dispense grace in a society that seems to be veering away from God?

First, as should be clear by now, I believe that dispensing God's grace is the Christian's main contribution

Gordon MacDonald said, the world can do anything the church can do except one thing: it cannot show grace.

In sum, I would far rather convey grace than explain it.

Where is the church when it hurts? If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don't think people will wonder so much where God is when it hurts. They'll know where God is: in the presence of God's people on earth.

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?

Something inside me recoiled as I heard her repeat the clichéd comments from her visitors. Is Christianity supposed to make a sufferer feel even worse?