Love and compassion can include warm fuzzy feelings, but they also include some pretty mundane activities, like loading up mattresses at Sam's or staying up late to spray headboards.
It doesn't always feel good to do acts of kindness. Sometimes it does, but other times it feels pretty ordinary or even tedious. These feelings can be a barrier to love and compassion.
Expending energy is not something the body wants to do unless there is a payoff to it of some kind. Most often the things the body wants to expend energy on are not always compatible with love and compassion. How are we to deal with this incompatibility?
Do we will our self to do it?
Will –noun
1. the faculty of conscious and especially of deliberate action
The will is synonymous with the heart or spirit in the bible. The heart is the well spring of action. It is also relatively weak and easily influenced. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" really means that the body is powerful and often over rules the will. The mind, emotions, and social aspects of our being also have an influence on our will.
Since the heart is that place that God's Spirit chooses to dwell, God can also influence our will. His will, His love, His compassion, His justice can influence our will, if we let it (it's that free-will thing). I don't think it is a given or automatic. It likely involves asking, seeking, knocking and a heavy dose of pushing back the competing influences, paying attention, and then doing.
It is no fun loading up mattresses at Sam's. But there is no love or compassion without doing that. We don't wait for mattresses to rain down. We work to pay for them and we get out of our chair and load them. Not because it is fun or easy. Not out of a sense of duty or pride. But for the joy set before us. Tomorrow night, that joy will be evidenced in the faces of 5 poor kids living at the center of our culture's oppression and injustice.
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