Living Inside the Skin.

"Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin." --Frederick Buechner

Being present on a daily basis with many folks who are suffering and dying has opened my eyes to what it may mean to be more compassionate. While it is impossible for me to be inside another’s skin, it is possible for me to be present with folks in their suffering and to set aside my judgements.

To be present, and therefore compassionate, requires that I suspend my judgement of the person.

Can you suspend your judgement of others and yourself?

I encounter people who are medically distressed for various reasons, they are often (if not always) emotionally and spiritually distressed as well. In her book The Art and Practice of Compassion & Empathy, Margot Lasher notes "There is a difference between understanding and judging. Understanding is simply seeing the situation clearly and accurately from some framework. Judging is seeing the situation and evaluating it as right or wrong, good or bad, more or less valuable, from some framework."

In my work I am not called to judge, I am called to be compassionate.

Wonder what the church would look like if it operated from a place of compassion and understanding rather than judgement?

When I reflect on Jesus I notice that he had the ability to touch others from a place of where they were on their journey. He seemed to understand the person in the context in which they lived their lives. He often held his judgments in order to act from a place of compassion. This doesn’t suggest that he did not have judgements about a person, it means that he did not allow his judgements to interfere with acting compassionately toward another person. In the story of the son who returns home, the father probably had judgements about the son’s behavior, but he saw beyond the actions of the son and sat aside his judgements in order act out of compassion.

Compassion heals, renews and restores.
God knows how to heal and is able to set aside his judgements
of humanity in order to enter into our suffering and to begin to heal us.

Noticing the wounds do not justify or excuse behavior or to ignore our values, it allows us to suspend judgement long enough in order to seek to understand and to make room for compassion. For if we are unwilling or unable to seek to understand we will never be able to heal.

What would you life look like if you set aside or suspended your judgements of yourself and others sought to understand yourself and others?

Instead of looking at others or yourself as right or wrong or good or bad, what if you looked deeper into the soul and see what Jesus sees, the wounds that lead to certain behavior. It doesn’t excuse behavior, but it makes room for compassion.

Henri Nouwen said, "Our task is to prevent our fears from boxing our fellow human beings into characterizations and to see them as persons."

God does not box people into to a particular characterization, rather God seeks to restore and understand so much so that God becomes a person in order that we may be more fully human through his compassion. God is willing to live inside our skin so that we can live inside the skin of others. That's where we find God.