Confrontation with suffering does not lead to compassion

Confrontation with human suffering does not lead to compassion. It leads to anger, numbness, irritation, and rejection, because we don’t know how to deal with it all. It is too much. It is a heavy burden–more than we can carry…

A burden becomes a heavy burden when it doesn’t feel connected to anything else. It is a burden that we have to carry by ourselves and is not shared. It is not part of anything larger. It just sits there and presses us down, down, down…

This is the mystery of the Christian life. It is not that God came to take our burden away or to take our cross away or to take our agony away. No. God came to invite us to connect our burden with God’s burden, to connect our suffering with God’s suffering, to connect our pain to God’s pain. The great invitation of the Christian life is to live a life of connectedness with the Son of God who died broken.