caring

I am not posing these questions only to the world at large. I query us who own Christ as our life. Can God be pleased by the vast and increasing inequities among us? Is he not grieved by our arrogant accumulation, while Christian brothers and sisters elsewhere languish and die? Is it not obligatory upon us to see beyond the nose of our own national interest, so that justice may roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Is there not an obligation upon us to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God is we want to live in his wonderful peace?

If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?

The greatest gift you can give is your time. _Not money, not items, not food, not pretty cards with handwritten sentiment, but time. _People need your presence. _The way you can help a soul the most is to simply be there.

Have you noticed that you feel better around some people than others? You smile more in their presence and afterward feel a little lighter, a bit more cheerful? I think of those people as __urveyors of hope._ They help me to know that beyond every mountain I face there is a path...even if I can't see it from the valley.

Treat people like people. Beware of pity and patronization because in them, you can't see when you're unashamedly looking down on someone.

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

Food-sharing is an innate way that we show our love for people we care about. Including others in times of celebration is an act of kindness.

Nothing has value without self worth

It is unfortunate that for some, kindness is an unwarranted expenditure, compassion an avoidable weakness, and love an unnecessary gamble.

Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first.

The day you find out who you are is when you look back and realize that it was never the words, rather your actions that defined you.

Kindness is going out of your way to perform favors regarded as wonderful by the recipient.

The soft heart is not a thing to harden but a treasure to protect. For soft hearts extend mercy, compassion, refuge, and God__ redemption to the world.

How do we change the world? By sending out a ripple of love that will affect one person at a time.

The emphasis and the reason for a pure humility is to result in love for others; not always necessarily the belittlement of self. When there is pride and self-righteousness and being pretentiously too far above, generally, one has a difficult time reaching the compassionate side of love for others, the side that understands (or at least attempts to understand): 'I am aware that I am not so far from falling in the same way.' Humility seeks to understand, and sometimes even relate; and in result, the love lovingly, properly, effectively wills the removal of the destructive sins of another as from oneself.