Compassion

We've been reading this week about Amy Carmichael. She's a woman who devoted her life to living in India, established an orphanage of sorts and caring for girls sold to the Buddhist Temples. The focus of these short stories about her life have been on compassion. Not only did Amy feel sorry for these "temple girls" but she did something about it. She took them into her home and became her mother. So yesterday, we talked about ways that we can show compassion.
Last night when Philip came home from school, he was telling us that he volunteered to do a devotion for a meeting he had to attend. He ran into the guy who was scheduled to do the devotion and he was really sick. So Philip offered to fill in for him. Some time after the conversation, Peter tell him, "Daddy, you were showing Mr. Jim compassion. You didn't just feel sorry for him because he was sick you helped him."

Wow- those are the moments that you want to remember. Sure we didn't get the math worksheet done or the book read I wanted to but Peter learned and applied compassion. To be honest, I wasn't even intended to "study" compassion. It just came about in conversation based on the story we read together that morning.