Compassion can sometimes go sideways. After talking briefly with an older woman in the community garden our church served in, she asked for a ride home. I didn’t mind, but as I drove her I soon realized she was quite intoxicated. She couldn’t quite remember where she lived and got a bit angry at me during the drive.
You’d think I would have learned from that situation, but after a stranger knocked on our church door years later, I agreed to give him a ride down the street. It seemed like the pastorly thing to do. But as soon as he hopped into my car, the plan changed. He just needed to stop by a house real quick, and he needed me to wait for him. Then he needed to go to the ATM. Then he needed me to get him money from the ATM, and I said no. Then he needed to go back to the previous house. I soon started suspecting that I was in the middle of a drug deal.
At one point, he persuaded me take him to a corner store, where he asked me to go inside and buy him a beer, which felt like a ploy to get me out of my car so he could steal it. I refused, so he went inside and bought his own beer and then drank it in my car after I told him not to. Exhausted from being taken advantage of, I told him I would only make one more trip and that he would get out of my car wherever we ended up. He agreed, then had me drive him for 15 minutes to his friend’s house out in the country. His friend wasn’t home when he arrived, and I told him that he was getting out of my car anyway. He argued with me until I finally got him out, leaving him at this house far from the city.
I felt horrible about it, but there was no end in sight. It’s complicated to sort out what the Jesus thing to do is when situations go sour. All he needed at the start of this was a 3-minute drive to an apartment complex. How did it get so out of control?
Partially because he knew I was a pastor, and I wanted to represent Jesus well. Partially because he knew where my church was, and I didn’t want him to do something to it. But mostly because I wanted to serve Jesus, even if it made me uncomfortable. Such attempts to serve those in need can sometimes go sideways, even when strangers doesn’t mean for it to. For example, our associate pastor once gave someone a ride home, and the person had a bowel accident in the pastor’s car.
And so you learn from situations like these, as you discern what makes sense when the next scenario rolls around. You start to note the warning signs and what kind of wisdom to sort into your compassion. It’s hard to make set rules, because every situation is different. There are lots of compassionate people in my church who have given strangers rides home (especially when they have too many of our food bank supplies to comfortably walk home with), and it’s gone just fine.
Finding the way of love can sometimes be harder to sort out than you might think—even in simple situations. This was even the case for Jesus, who had to sort out his compassion with his own circumstances. The gospels point to Jesus’s compassion as the reason he kept healing, teaching, and serving people, even when he was exhausted, grieving, and burnt out. People knew that if they touched him, they might get healed, so Jesus was constantly crushed by the crowds that gathered around him like a living relic. They’d even cut holes in ceilings to get close to him if they had to. And so in wisdom, Jesus sometimes had to preach to people from a boat to create some space. But that didn’t mean he never walked into the crowd again.
Despite the difficulty of serving those in need, Jesus was moved by a deep compassion in his gut, which he sorted his wisdom around. May we seek out the Holy Spirit for the same compassion and wisdom that he had.
Jamin Bradley 
Leave a comment