The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.
—James 5:11
The Diary of Anne Frank is an extraordinary book written by a Jewish teenager. It’s a journal of her family’s two years in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.
Anne’s compassion for others in the Nazi death camp where she died endeared her to all. One Anne Frank scholar marveled that she never displayed “compassion fatigue.”
We are vulnerable to “compassion fatigue.” We never drive far without seeing a median occupied by someone with a cardboard sign; rarely go online without encountering a Crowdfund site; seldom go to the mailbox without finding an appeal from a charity. It tends to desensitize our sympathetic inclinations.
Keep your heart in tender mode. “As God’s chosen people . . . clothe yourselves with compassion” (Col 3:12).
You can’t help everybody,
but you can help somebody.