I want to know. ...Desperately, I want to know.
The Latin roots of the word "compassion" are com (meaning "together" or "with") and pati (meaning "to suffer"). So to have compassion essentially means "to suffer with." But how do you suffer with someone who has brought suffering into your life? How do you love that person? Even when they seem oblivious to the pain they're inflicting on those around them? How do you walk beside them even as you experience a kind of dying with every step of the way?
I don't know. But I do know that He is faithful. I do know that He is honest and true and gracious...always. Because you see, I've been that person. I am that person. I cause Him grief and suffering and pain every day in my rebellion and hard-heartedness. I don't say this to guilt-trip myself. I say this to highlight His amazing, marvelous, breathtaking, eternal Love for me. The kind of Love that forgives continuously. The kind of Love that keeps no record of wrong. The kind of Love that says, "Yes, the Law matters (God's perfect, unchanging standard matters) and you matter, so because I love you, I'll take your sin upon Myself and die for you so that you can be counted as blameless and right with Me...so that you can live with Me eternally." This kind of Love that says, "I will literally, truly love you to death, yes, even unto death."
This is the kind of Love that I have exemplified for me on the cross. This kind of Love that is willing to suffer with another person and for another person even when the enemy says to do otherwise. Even when the enemy of our souls says that that person is not worth it; even when he says they don't matter, that what they did was worse than anything you'd ever do so why don't you just give up on them right now and build up a wall of bitterness against them because they don't deserve your love?
The thing is, (and here I'm convicted), that as soon as I hold a grudge against another person, I am making the ludicrous, outrageous claim that somehow I deserve God's love and forgiveness and this other person does not. Unforgiveness just goes to show that I have a distorted view of myself: that somehow I earned God's grace and worked up my own righteousness on my own. My vengefulness simply reveals that I have believed satan's lies; that I have told myself that hatred will somehow give me life in the form of power, control, and an elevated position above the other person. The truth is, that even as satan promises me life, he is leading me towards my demise.
And here in this realization, there is a chance to change, a change to see differently, to see anew. Here at the cross, I can look up and see how Jesus loved me. He died to give me life and it is through death - a thousand quiet deaths to self daily - that I find true life. One of my favorite verses says that we must look to Jesus, "the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross..." (Hebrews 12:2) He saw us as worth the suffering...even the very worst suffering. And the wonderful, incredible news is that we get to enter into His joy, share with Him in His joy, when we also endure the suffering that always comes when we commit to loving another person who is just as broken and just as desperately in need of His grace as we are.
So in the end, I do know. I know that His love lives inside of me and enables me to love others. And I know that loving others will always be worth it because I know that He is Love and that it is through loving others that we all will receive life.
"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him." -1 John 4:7-9