One of the lamest ways to begin any speech, sermon, or blog post is with a definition from a dictionary.
Please allow me to be momentarily lame. And thanks for your forgiveness in advance.
There's a word I want to define for you, something that I think is very important to understand. Something that very few of us remember on a consistent basis:
Compassion.
According to my very official source of Dictionary.com, here's the definition of compassion:
1. a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.
What's interesting to me is the way that this definition seems to fall into two pieces. The first piece sounds an awful lot like empathy, but includes the word sympathy, so I suppose it's different. The first piece of compassion includes a feeling.
Personally, I don't place much stock in feelings. Feelings can happen for any number of reasons, including (but not limited to!) a change in weather, hormones, or a bad pasta bowl from Olive Garden. Feelings are just that: something you feel. Nothing more. Not much else to them.
Now, granted, there's probably a little more to them than I am letting on, but I'm biased. But in my heart of hearts, I believe that any feelings not accompanied by action are hogwash. They're nonsense. They mean nothing.
And that's why I like the second part of this definition. True compassion is not only a feeling, but a desire. And while many would classify desires as feelings, I believe there's something more to desire.
Desire is craving. If you desire something, it means you want and sometimes even need something. Your heart and mind are telling you that you are lacking something, even if you really aren't. And more often than not, desire leads to my favorite result: action.
