Compassion in Action

Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. Our reading, titled Compassion in Action, was written by Patricia Rabin. Building benches isn't James Warren's job. He started building them, however, when he noticed a woman in Denver sitting in the dirt while waiting for a bus. That's undignified, Warren worried, so the 28-year-old workforce consultant found some scrap wood, built a bench, and placed it at the bus stop.

It quickly got used. Realizing many of the 9,000 bus stops in his city lacked seating, he made another bench, then several more, inscribing, Be Kind on each one. His goal? To make people's lives just a little bit better in any way I can, Warren said. Compassion is another way of describing such action. As practiced by Jesus, compassion is a feeling so strong that it leads us to take action to meet another's need. When crowds of desperate people pursued Jesus, Mark 6, 34 says, He had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. He turned that compassion into action by healing their sick. We, too, should clothe ourselves with compassion, Paul urged in Colossians 3.12. The benefits? As Warren says, it fills me up.

It's air in my tires. All around us are needs, and God will bring them to our attention. Those needs can motivate us to put our compassion into action, and those actions will encourage others as we show them the love of Christ.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Colossians chapter 3, verses 12 through 14. Let's pray. Dear Lord, as we see pain and need all around us, please soften our hearts to act with Christ-like compassion and meet those needs wherever we're able. Thank you, Lord. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.