The Talent of Compassion

I could hear his screams as I walked into the house from the garage. They were unlike any I had heard from him before, almost animal-like, and desperate. Coming from a child who rarely cries unless he has a great reason, I knew something was up. His older brother and sister hovered over him as he lay face down on the carpet, trying to offer him toys to calm his cries. They looked a little anxious, but not overly concerned. She immediately spoke up with a small voice. "While I was carrying him, I tripped, and we both fell down".

I scooped him up and carried him to the couch to ease his cries.  I am a laid back parent when it comes to injury, and usually assume everything will be just fine. I thought that my presence and comforting words would begin to ease his cries, like they usually do, but he only screamed louder.  I tried to sing him songs in low, soothing tones, rocking him back and forth. I tried "Pat-a-Cake" and "This Little Piggy". I offered him snacks and treats, which usually has a 100% success rate. 40 minutes later, he was still crying and whimpering inconsolably. Then a thought flashed in to my mind, like a lightning bolt of revelation. "Try to get him to stand". I hopped off of the couch right away, and supporting him with my hands under his arms, placed him on his feet on the floor. His left leg immediately gave way and his crying escalated a notch. I tried it two more times, and each time, he refused to put any pressure on his left leg. "Oh my gosh. My sweet, helpless, perfect baby. His leg is broken".

 I picked him up, careful to avoid any pressure or jostling to his leg and shoved a sucker in his mouth. His wails quit like they had been shut off with a switch. It was as if he knew that he no longer needed to cry for help because assistance was on its way. After calling his dad, I loaded all of the kids in the car and we made a quick trip to urgent care, where my suspicions were confirmed with an x-ray. Miraculously, he rarely complained for the rest of the night, stealing the hearts of the medical staff and prompting them to say they had never had such a happy baby in their clinic.

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10 years ago, I was preparing to leave on an 18 month mission. My Bishop asked me to give a talk on my last Sunday at church. He left the topic completely up to me, a gutsy move from a man who had met me in his office multiple times over the preceding two years to try and help me put back together the pieces of a very broken spirit and body. After a lot of deliberation, I chose to speak on "The Savior's Talent of Compassion". It was a topic that, given my recent life experiences, I felt like I had a very intimate knowledge of. I am glad that I didn't know then how much more intimately I would need to become acquainted with that compassion in the coming years.

My Heavenly Father sent me to this earth perfect and whole, without blemish. I am His child, His precious baby, no less related and connected than my children are to me.  His DNA is written on every part of who I am. His goal is for me to grow, learn, progress, and to become like He is. It's the same goal that every good parent has had for their child through the balance of time. There is only one problem: This earth that He has sent me to is ugly, filthy, and fallen. It is filled with innumerable ways for me to separate myself from Him, getting the ugly sludge of this world onto and inside of me. Add to that the countless daggers that can cause any number of wounds through no fault of my own, and I am sure my Father weeps as he watches me try to navigate my way.

By very nature of my being here, I have fallen no less than 5 million times. More, I am sure, I have just lost count. Each fall breaks a part of me, and pulls me down into the sludge. I have willingly and knowingly made choices that caused fractures to my soul, sometimes fractures so bad that they have broken through my physical exterior and are visible on the outside. I have also been the victim of other's choices on numerous occasions. These knife-like choices, some so scary they are the stuff nightmares are made of, leave me with open wounds so big you can see daylight through them. And so, at the end of the day, I am left broken, bloody, and crippled. We all are. It's not just me.

My natural reaction to my terrifying state, the reaction I have relied on for years to protect me and preserve what little strength I might have left, is to hide. I have viewed my fractures and gaping, bloody holes as so ugly, that I am afraid that the rest of the world will run and hide from them. From me. And so I covered them with hard work, with a clean house, with a smile, with extraordinary effort in my church callings. I hid them from the world around me. Sometimes, in my burning hot shame, I even tried to hide them from God.  After all, how could He love someone as broken as I am? I have made and continue to make choices in direct defiance of what he has asked me to do. It would seem to some that I am a lost cause, beyond repair.

Luckily, in the last ten years, I have slowly but surely learned a few more things about the talent of compassion possessed by my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Most recently, I have learned that He views my broken state, whether from my own actions or inflicted by others, the very same way that I viewed my precious baby when he broke his leg. All of his energy is expended to first, show us compassion and comfort. Then his sole focus is to help us figure out where the pain is coming from and how it happened. Finally, I believe that with everything He has, He turns to helping us heal and progress past the break, leaving us stronger than we ever were in the first place. But with all of his energy thrown into these things, it leaves Him no energy for shaming us. God does not deal in shame. Shame needs fear and darkness to thrive. Fear and darkness are the currency of another being, but certainly never God.  My Heavenly Father is a God of unconditional love. Unconditional means that it doesn't matter what I've done, how I feel, how I act, or what has been done to me. His love is there. This does not mean He is a permissive God, believing that it is impossible for me to break in the first place. It is a rare talent to be unconditional and not be permissive, but being God, He can pull it off.

I believe He expects each of us to view EACH OTHER in the exact same light. When we do not treat each other this way, there is fuel for the fire of shame. Shame causes us to withdraw and hide from the very help and healing we need to move past our wounds. Brene Brown, a researcher, and one of my very favorite wise people on this planet, said "Shame cannot survive empathy". I know that to be true with all of my heart. I pray for the strength to not hide my breaks, so that others will have the courage to not hide theirs. Only then can we all heal together.