Awoke to thick snowflakes falling like manna from heaven. Stuck to ground but melted now; very late spring here, and unusual. I suppose every day and night and how God unfolds them are unusual!
My thoughts have been regarding the importance of compassion, indiscriminate compassion regardless of persons' actions and words, especially when it comes to the usual human decline and the life situations that occur by our errors in judgment, decisions, and wrong-turns from the narrow path. God always has compassion, no matter what, even if we deserve what we get coming to us, even if we have caused some of our own problems, even if we choose unkindness and a type of ugliness in our lives.
To learn to love to love as God loves, I realize I need this indiscriminate compassion. I need to have compassion as God has compassion, as this is crucial and indispensable in loving as God loves. Love requires compassion; love requires mercy. Compassion (mercy) does not condone ugliness, unkindness, evil, wrong word and wrong action or even wrong thoughts; but compassion (mercy) is a form of loving understanding and empathy for all souls (and the persons whose souls are within them.)
Compassion, or mercy, is very difficult particularly if we have been the recipient of ugliness, unkindness, rudeness, wrong thoughts, words, and/or wrong actions. Compassion or mercy, is most challenging when we read or hear about or are recipients of (even if in being part of the community of humankind) evil. God never fails nor falters in having mercy, or compassion, on even the worst of humankind; of the most vile and vicious of persons He maintains mercy and compassion.
I took time yesterday to ponder various situations, the worst and most heinous of humankind I could fathom and had read about or heard about in my long lifetime. In each, I came to realize that God had mercy and compassion for these souls and the persons whose souls were or are within. Yes, there are temporal and eternal consequences for those who think, say, and do wrong; but that is not the point. Having mercy and compassion is the point: I need to have compassion, to show mercy, without hesitation and for any and all, if I am going to learn how to love as God loves.
Jesus looked over Jerusalem one evening, prior to His being trapped, arrested, brutalized, unfairly tried and convicted, and cruelly crucified, He overlooked Jerusalem and saw and had seen as God sees--all the persons with their souls, and all the sins and the sins yet to be perpetrated for years and centuries to come. And the Living Word simply states: Jesus wept. Jesus wept due to the compassion and mercy He holds and offers, always, eternally; he has compassion and mercy as part of what it is to love as God Loves, as Jesus Christ is the Son of God and loves as God loves, being God Himself.
I'm practicing and learning to love as God Loves; and now I must also focus on having compassion and offering mercy no matter what others have thought, said, and done in action. The mercy and compassion I am learning and possess within me, to be released from His Real Presence within me to without of me--this is how I am on my way to learning to love as God Loves. Nothing is as crucial to me as is now learning to release His compassion within me, His mercy that is within me because I am within His Real Presence and He is within me. This compassion is always with me and able to be released, dispensed, without hesitation, for mercy is His and now also mine, to give without critical review but freely, instantaneously.
This is the next step in learning to love as God Loves: to recognize and release His mercy and have compassion instantaneously, automatically, for as I am His and He is mine, His mercy and compassion is also mine to give freely and fully, without hesitation or mental deliberation, review, inner conflict.
I must practice this, for my humanness has made me rusty; grace and my cooperation with His grace will remove the rust and create in me a clean heart to see and release mercy and compassion no matter all else no matter who it is I encounter in whatever aspect, including memory of those of the past.
God bless His Real Presence in me! Love in His Love!
Dear Lord, please keep showing me all the facets and what I must learn to learn to love as You Love!
Letter to the Philippians 2,6-11.
Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father
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