Compassion and Protection

I don’t really think of myself as a mystic but maybe I should start. Lots of people get reflective around the end of the year, but there is something that happens in my spirit at that time that I only know how to describe as mystical. There is this urgency within me that the season is changing and I need to know what God is saying about both the previous year and the new year. I feel unsettled until I’ve taken the time to journal, reflect, and listen to what Holy Spirit is saying. I feel like there are two main things God wants to teach me about himself this year: his compassion and his protection. These two characteristics are significant for two very different reasons but I have a feeling they are intimately connected.

All I want to do in this post is give a little context for what I’m hoping to write about and explain why these two topics are important to me.

A month ago I met with my revival group pastor at school to process my experiences with intercession. Through that conversation I realized that it was easy for me to understand the justice of God because I knew he was the best option for all the problems in our world: he promises to make all things new and I trust him to do that. I know I can’t fix world issues like poverty or racism or war, but I have mistakenly acted like I could fix people’s individual (often emotional) problems. If you had asked me directly if I believed Jesus was the answer to the problems in people’s lives, I would have given you a hearty, ‘Of course!’ but somewhere along the way I took on a bit of a saviour complex.

Were my thoughts as blatant as, “Of course Jesus cares about their problem, but I’m here right now so I’ll just fix it,” or more like, “Oh, they’re hurting so much that I just want to carry their pain for them.” Probably both. I realized that while I felt compassion for people, Jesus’ compassion caused him to come as Saviour for not just our sins, but also for the problems we find ourselves caught up in. It was his compassion that moved him to heal and respond to the people around him. I want to understand what real compassion looks like because I’m tired of carrying burdens I could have immediately given up to the real Saviour. Not just Saviour of our broken world, of our sins, but also Saviour of the situations we find ourselves in, when our feelings are hurt, when we don’t know how to move forward.

I started thinking about God’s protection for completely different reasons. I’ve had a bunch of conversations this past semester about non-violence and what Jesus actually teaches about our response to violence. (This topic will come up again. You know I have opinions.) At some point during one of the many conversations, my friend asked how what I believed about non-violence fit in with how God promises to protect his people. I didn’t have a great answer and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Can God protect us without using violence? How are we to model his protective nature in a world that (often) understands protection through violent means? These are the types of questions I want to explore this year.

I know I’ve only just scratched the surface with these two themes, but I wanted to give a little background and vision for where I’m headed with this blog. Compassion and protection…not what I expected to focus on in 2016, but I’m ready to learn some new things and recalibrate my heart and mind to the truth of who Jesus as Saviour and protector really is.

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