Mercy

My friend asked if he could tell me something personal and private. "Of course," I said. He told me he was interested in a certain girl and asked if I'd pray for him as he was planning to ask her out. I couldn't help but pray with him for everything to go well. But as I walked back to my place, I asked God to reconsider what I'd prayed. What I really wanted God to do was keep them from dating because I was interested in her, too.

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "Revelation," Mrs. Turpin sits in a doctor's waiting room while gospel music plays on the radio. To pass the time, she thinks about the people she looks down on being crammed into a railroad car and gassed to death. As she considers how good she has it, she thanks Jesus for making her the way she is. Suddenly, a girl attacks her, saying, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog." As Mrs. Turpin recovers at home, she goes out to the hog pen on her farm and starts to argue with God. To answer her, God gives her a vision of everyone who is going to heaven. At the front of the line are the poor white and black people she can't stand. At the very end are people like her. When she looks closely at them, "she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away."

On July 21, 2016, John Kirby was updating reporters on the U.S. fight against ISIS. Then he stopped and asked a reporter, "You're playing the Pokémon thing right there, aren't you?" The reporter acknowledged, "I'm just keeping an eye on it." Even when our job is to report on a war, we can distract and delight ourselves by catching virtual creatures.

The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff had written about God and suffering as an academic. But when he lost his 25-year-old son, Eric, in a mountaineering accident in 1983, the philosophical questions became personal. Four years later, in his book Lament for a Son, he wrote, "Suffering may do us good—may be a blessing, something to be thankful for. This I have learned...And sometimes, when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which elsewhere seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be."

A friend asked if I wanted to make a donation to a cause he supports. It was a worthy initiative: caring for kids who had lost their parents in war. As I weighed his message, I felt nothing. I already have my causes: serving at my church, supporting a local community service project, supporting a global initiative to relieve poverty, writing Bible studies. It's okay to have limits. I can't fix every problem. But his question reminded me that my compassion only goes so far.