When praying is not enough

There are a few Christian platitudes of which I am simply tired:

• #blessed (Especially when it's used after something superficial like finding a good deal in the clearance section at Target.)
• God never gives you more than you can handle (Just...no....this is steeped in wrong theology. God DOES give us more than we can handle. Remember the thorn in Paul's side?)
• I will pray for you

For the record: I'm guilty of using all of these at one point in my life...especially the last one. It's not a bad thing to pray for people in times of distress. As we see in the gospels, Jesus himself prayed during times of distress. However, do you know what he did more frequently? He acted.


I'm slowly moving my way through the book of Matthew, and my biggest takeaway is how frequently Jesus was compelled to act. He healed people, fed people, trained people for ministry, called out religious zealots, turned over tables, raised people from the dead. There are more instances of Jesus acting in the book of Matthew than there are of Jesus praying. Matthew 9:36-38 reads,

"When he [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.'"

Jesus was moved to compassion by people on the fringes--compassion that resulted in both prayer and action. I fear we're missing this as a collective body of Christians. When I pause to think about how many times I've promised prayer to a person without any sort of accompanying action to lighten his/her burden, I'm quite ashamed. I think there's a few reasons for my inaction, but the main might be that I have not allowed myself to be moved by compassion often enough.