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“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin.”  ~ Frederick Buechner

Is that why we suffer from “compassion fatigue”? My own damn skin is hard enough to live inside of {thank-you very much} without crawling inside yours as well. And I’m not even—necessarily—talking about the overseas, bloated-bellies-burning-under-the-heat-of-an-African-desert-sun kind of compassion. Although, the description fits. I’ve heard there in a great famine in the land. I think I read about it somewhere while I was eating ice-cream.

No, I had my own collision with Compassion the other day and it was one of those moments. You know . . . ? The kind when the veil is gossamer-thin at the same time, by Someone’s intimate orchestration, the heart is clay-soft. And you might as well be a pile of broken flesh on the floor for as undone as you are when the two sensations slam together. The most elemental meaning to life—that a mortal can see—is revealed just then and maybe you won’t feel the same way come morning, but if an altar can be built or a memory committed during that moment, it might be enough to hold your turn-the-other-way-feet to the fire-of-what-you-ought-to-do, even if—and especially when—you don’t feel like it.

Christ knows how many things I don’t feel like doing. But this year we chose to be a New Kingdom family and a big decision like that cannot be made without sky-scraping ripples and repercussions. {That sounds like a lot of movement to me—the scraping and the ripples and the repercussions. Oh my. I wonder if this body can handle it?}

The sun was falling low and my heart was racing fast when my eyes took it all in—an orphan website displaying hundreds of little-Jesus faces, each one has the “waiting” look and a big smile—like they were told by some caregiver to stretch it as far as their cheeks could go because it might make the difference of a family for them or not. A life hung by the thread of an upturned mouth. And I would swear to you that the internet is an inanimate object, but sometimes the Spirit jumps from the screen like a nighttime wolverine, teeth bared and all and He does not always need to be gentle, does He? This time, the connection between us was visceral and I could feel that He wasn’t going to let go. After all, I have told Him time and again that I don’t want to be anything less then everything for His kingdom and I mean it with every fragile ounce of my humanity. And He’s just holding me to my own professed yearnings and savage promises. I’m sure if I wanted to renege, I could.

Girl meets Wolverine on a Sunday evening and it later brought me to the kitchen table with my husband, him holding me in his Guardian-arms and me with the tears and a barely there whisper—choked-up on my own twisting aorta, the words fall out: “There are orphans in this world honey. Do you know what orphans are . . .? They’re children without homes and mommies and daddies and I cannot carry this dark burden anymore without doing something. And I know we don’t have to bear the whole world’s parent-less little-people, but could we hold one? Or two?”

The husband {with the heart bigger then the state of texas where he came from} prompted us and together we joined our quivering lips and prayed into the indigo sky—he prayed his prayers of surrender and I prayed mine: “Thy will be done”, I said, but only through the clenching and unclenching of my heart.

Because I’m still scared. You know . . . ? What if I indulge so far into compassion that I don’t have anything left? No time to read or write or dither around the bookstore-with-the-coffee-shop? What if I indulge so far I don’t have the energy to sit in the sleeping-house-silence? Will my introverted soul be sustained?

These earth-skin questions come real quick-like while I’m calling the local adoption agency, asking about their open houses, but I remember the Wolverine and His bared teeth and how He lived so far inside the skin of the world, for Him, compassion was a “fatal capacity”. This image bolsters me and I drink it like a gimlet of ambrosiac elixir while pulling the thief-gripped puppet strings one by one from my flesh because all the free time in my world isn’t going to wrap an orphan in love; my own desire to convalesce in comfort won’t hold a mother-less child.

I will live inside my skin, painful though it is. And I will live inside your skin too and together . . . if we’re all living inside each other’s skin? God. It feels like a scourging, but it looks like Christ to me.

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside someone else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ”  ~ Frederick Buechner

Teach us how to love, Abba::Amma. The world is wide open.

{Please leave comments to this post at Deeper Story.}