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.


So, how do we do this? How do we step outside of our own personal tragedies (I don't say that with sarcasm) and allow ourselves to be moved to compassion?

I think the answer can be found by examining Jesus' behaviors throughout the book of Matthew. Obviously, Jesus was born with a bent towards compassion, but Jesus deliberately spent time with and served people. What separates Jesus from so many of us is how involved he was in people's lives. While it may have been an interaction in passing, Jesus' actions in passing were both tender and relevant to people's immediate needs (see the book of Matthew for more). And he was constantly doing this. There were certainly times when Jesus isolated himself to pray and hear from God, but he didn't cocoon himself in his own issues for long. I think there are seasons for cocooning, but if we never step outside our own front doors and into the lives of people who are struggling--if we never look past our own issues, then I'm not sure we'll ever be moved to compassion.

Additionally, a quick scan of one of the gospel accounts will reveal that Jesus did not hole himself up with the religious elites. He kept his circle broken and engaged with and served the outcasts and the criminals and the poor and the strangers. Go back to Matthew 9:36: Jesus was moved to compassion by the harassed and the helpless. When we sit safely in white, middle class America for too long, we can begin to ignore the plight of others because it's not right in front of us. Ignoring the suffering of others is a disgusting privilege I'm learning that I possess. I can deactivate my social media feeds, turn off NPR, and engage only with my closest friends and pretty much avoid being faced with major catastrophes or injustices. In contrast, when I engage with the "harassed and the helpless" in my communities, I have opportunities to be moved to compassion and practice the long lost art of empathy.

If we aren't moved to compassion, then we'll say things like "I'll pray for you" when someone is vulnerable enough to share his/her struggles with us and then leave it at that. We'll add a two-line blip in our church bulletins about praying for those impacted by the hurricanes/earthquakes/other natural disasters.

I don't know why this image made me laugh so hard, but it did. So, it's here for comedic relief. Thanks, Pexels, for keeping it light. 

What if we acted like prayer alone was not enough? What if we allowed ourselves to be moved by compassion? How different would our communities be? How much richer would our relationships be? We don't need big, costly actions--but when a friend is struggling with balancing work and parenting and asks for prayer, can we also bring that person dinner one night to lighten the load? When a young woman dies at a rally organized by white supremacists, can we pray for Jesus to fix it while also listening to the lament and rage of our brothers and sisters of color? Can we be compelled then to turn away from systems of white supremacy from which we have directly benefited for so long? When difficulty strikes, when people ask for prayer, we have an opportunity to show compassion like Jesus did throughout the gospels.

It's easy to read a post and feel all the feels and commit to change. It's much harder to do the self-examination required to think about why we haven't been compelled to compassion in the past or to examine why we've substituted prayer for action. It's more difficult to rearrange our busy and often self-serving calendars to make time for engaging with folks. It's not glamorous to serve people and meet their immediate needs. It's hard to build relationships with people who don't look or think like us. It's all harder when Jesus is our measuring stick. May we be a people, though, who engage in the hard and holy work of compassion, of backing up prayer with action.