Payback

Psalm 116

The Youth and Young Adults of our church held their annual fundraiser this past Sunday. We cooked, cleaned, prepped, and prepared over 200 plates for lunch. Of course we didn't do it alone as we had help from a few parents and adults as well as a lot of help from the Youth of the high school I work at.

Everyone worked very hard. We also worked really well. In the 4 years I've done this fundraiser, this year went the smoothest. It's not so much because we had lots of volunteers or every step was planned and executed as planned. I think it was because the people who were there wanted the fundraiser to be successful.

Our Youth group isn't very big in numbers, but we're all big in heart, and, more to their true reason for being in church, bigger in service. We talk a lot about how much God does for us and how, even when things aren't going well in our lives, God is by our side, trying to show us the way through whatever is troubling us and sharing in the things that are going well.

We understand there's really no way to pay God back for everything God has done, but the one thing we can do is to share our lives with others in the same way God shares with us. That's what we call compassion.

Compassion is defined in several ways, but the one definition I live by is by breaking down the root-meaning of the word. Com is defined as with, while the root word for passion, pasio, is defined as suffer, but taken as meaning "life's journeys". Compassion, therefore, is to share the life-journeys of others, which is what God does with us. So, the best way to "payback" the things God does for us is to do as God does with us and share in the journeys of others.

When those who volunteered for our fundraiser got together as one people, united in a single purpose, we did an amazing thing. The same can happen all around us, all we need is for someone to start living with compassion - will that be you?