There will be times in your life when you will be faced with problems for which you don't seem to have a solution. Sometimes it's a friend who recently lost a loved one or a family member going through a stressful time in their life.
Words fail you, and while you literally feel their pain, you don't know what you can do to ease their burden, even a little. In fact, it shows that you already have the best gift you can share with them, which is love.
Love is at the heart of compassion
What you feel is compassion, which literally means you suffer with them.
Out of love, you suffer with each other. You have compassion for him in his times of need.
Seen in this context, love is the driving force behind compassion that allows us to immerse ourselves in the needs of others. Think for a moment of those who share the suffering of children who, for one reason or another, have been placed in foster care.
There really is no answer but to be there for them and with them. This is especially difficult for children with disabilities and if you have nothing to offer but a loving home, this may be all it takes to begin the healing process.
When it is motivated by love
Compassion motivated by love is something that motivates workers such as those at Fostering People. You only have to look at what some of these children are going through, especially those with disabilities, to realize that we really have the best foundation for what we do. Unfortunately, these children have enough to endure a disability that can make them feel different from other children their age.
The current separation of parents does not help matters, even if it is temporary at best. However, our love deeply rooted in our hearts may be the only remedy beyond what modern medicine can do for them.
We have no control over what their family of origin does or can do, but we have that something alive within us that will help us weather this storm in their lives. There will probably be many more as they grow up and become adults, but this love we need to give them teaches them that they too have what it takes to face each new day with hope.
Many of these children already face complex health or emotional disabilities, for which we do not have an answer. We don't have a magic elixir to heal their physical pain, but we do have a love that is like a tonic for their soul, like an aspirin that can't heal a wound but can alleviate the pain until healing begins.
With suffering all around you
Foster care is just one example of what it means to consider love as the best thing to offer. Whenever you can sit next to a person who is suffering and suffer with them, you are expressing compassion rooted in love. You literally suffer together. This person is not alone and it is because you have the special gift he needs: love, quite simply.
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