Spilled Coffee and Compassion

How you perceive a situation will determine your experience and your reaction. Let's imagine that you have a favorite coffeehouse that you frequent. The staff knows your name and always has a warm and friendly greeting as you walk through the door. An extremely grumpy woman whom you have never seen before serves you this particular morning. She appears preoccupied rather than caring about you or what she is doing. As she pours your hot coffee a good portion spills in your lap. Despite your jumping in shock, no apology follows. Your experience is anger: both toward the waitress and the owner, Joe, for hiring such an incompetent person. Then, a friend of yours at the next booth says, "Isn't it great that Joe hired her!"

"Great! Are you out of your mind? She just spilled hot coffee in my lap and walked away," you reply with your best indignant voice.

"Oh, you didn't hear the story?" your friend whispers.

"What story?" you angrily reply, still drying off your new slacks, wondering how you will go through the day looking as though you wet your pants.

"Yeah, Joe didn't know her from Adam. He read in the paper that her husband had died last month in a car accident. Apparently her husband's health insurance stopped, and she was looking for another job in order to pay for her sixteen-year-old son's chemotherapy for leukemia," your friend responds.

Now, you still have hot coffee in your crotch, but are you still angry? Unlikely. The only thing that shifted was your perception and attitude. Through discovering a reason to be compassionate, your entire experience changed—and there are always reasons to be compassionate.

An important part of healing (i.e., letting go of fear) is developing compassion. Instead of going out in the world and finding plenty of reasons to be upset, go out and discover reasons to extend love. There are thousands of reasons waiting for you right now. A helpful thought to remember is that a miracle is nothing more than allowing an old grievance to become a current compassion.

If you ever run short on reasons to be compassionate, remember there is always one good reason: It makes you feel better than anything else you could do.

Lee Jampolsky

The Master in the Masterpiece

One of Denmark’s leading sculptors had a burning ambition to create the greatest statue of Jesus ever made. He began by shaping a clay model of a triumphant, regal figure. The head was thrown back and the arms were upraised in a gesture of great majesty. It was his conception of Christ the King: Strong, Dominant. 

"This will be my masterpiece," he said, on the day the model was completed. But, during the night a heavy fog rolled into the area and sea-spray seeped through a partially opened window of the artist’s ocean-side studio. 

The moisture affected the shape of the model so that when the artist returned to the studio in the morning, he was shocked to find a wounded figure. The droplets of moisture that had formed on the statue created the illusion of bleeding. The head had drooped. The facial expression had been transformed from severity to compassion. And the arms had dropped into an attitude of welcome. 

The artist stared at the figure, agonizing over the time wasted and the need to begin all over again. But something came over him to change his mood. He began to see that this image of Christ was the truer one. Then he wrote at the base of the newly-shaped figure: "Come unto Me!"

‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ These gracious words of Christ might have been spoken yesterday or today–so true are they to the deepest need of our anxious times when so many broken and despairing voices murmur through the world.

A Boy, a Brick, and a Doctor

A Boy, a Brick, and a Doctor

"Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you."¹

In "Character Counts" Michael Josephson writes, "Consider the parable of a doctor driving through a poor part of town. He was in a hurry, so he ignored a young boy who tried to flag him down. But, as he slowed for a traffic light, his car was hit by a brick. The man got out of the car and screamed, 'You'll go to jail for this!'

"The boy cried, 'Take me to jail, but first please call someone to help my mom. She's on the floor in our apartment and I think she's dying. We have no phone and I couldn't get anyone to stop—I didn't know what else to do.'

"Filled with shame, the doctor rushed to the woman's aid and saved her life with CPR. Of course, he didn't call the police, and he made sure the boy was taken care of as his mom was taken to the hospital.

"When the doctor got home and told his wife, she said, 'Well, that dent will cost you $1,000 to fix.'"

"'No, it won't,' he said. 'I'm not fixing the dent. I'm going to leave it as it is to remind me that not everyone in need has a brick.'"²

Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please help me to be sensitive to the needs of people with whom I come in contact every day. I am available, please make me usable, and use me today to be 'as Jesus' in some way to every life I touch. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus' name, amen."

1. James 1:27 (NLT).
2. Michael Josephson, Character Counts.

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By Dick Innes