Stop

"When he saw the crowds." (Matthew 9:36)

The first act of compassion is not doing. It is stopping. Jesus is on his way somewhere in almost every one of these stories. He is going to Jairus's house and a woman touches his cloak and he stops. He is passing through Jericho and a blind man is shouting and everyone tells the man to be quiet and he stops. He is walking to a wedding, a funeral, a boat, a mountain, and something interrupts him, and he does not resent it. He stops.

And most of us do not. It is possible to walk past a person in obvious distress on the way to do something religious. It is possible to sit in a hospital waiting room mentally editing a calendar. It is possible to be present in a conversation and entirely absent from it, nodding, making the sounds, calculating the drive home. We treat the interruption as the obstacle to the ministry. But almost every time, in the Gospels, the interruption is the ministry. The thing that got in the way of the plan was the plan, and only Jesus seemed to know it.

You cannot see anybody at forty miles an hour. Compassion begins with a full stop, with letting your day be derailed by a person, with treating the one who interrupted you not as a delay but as the appointment you did not know God had made. So slow down enough to be interrupted. The people you are rushing past to go do good may be the good you were sent to do.