The Challenge of Compassion in a Broken World: Finding compassion and courage amid tragedy and loss
The last couple of weeks have left me thinking a lot about compassion —how deeply needed and necessary it really is, and what happens when it’s absent. A quick scroll through social media makes it obvious: we see both the presence and the lack of compassion everywhere. The word itself means “to suffer together.” That’s what compassion is—entering into someone else’s pain, even if it’s uncomfortable. We are called to suffer together with one another, even when it’s hard. We’ve seen many people show that kind of “suffering together” in response to what happened to Charlie Kirk. And we’ve also seen the opposite—responses marked by cruelty, heartlessness, and mercilessness —simply because they disagreed with what he believed. I even saw a video of someone saying that if you don’t have compassion for Charlie and his family—that’s okay, you don’t need to. But that’s exactly the problem. We’re losing sight of what compassion even means —and what it does to a society when it’s absent. Compass...
