The Compassion of Seeing

"Jesus went through all the towns and villages ... When he saw the crowds." (Matthew 9:35-36)

Before Jesus does anything for the crowd, he sees them. And we do not understand what that means, because seeing is the one thing we have almost entirely stopped doing. You have walked past a hundred people this week. Some were harassed. Some were helpless. Some were sheep with no shepherd anywhere in their lives, standing right beside you at a gas pump. And you did not see them.

Not because you are cruel. Because you were busy, and because seeing costs something, and because a person who genuinely sees another cannot easily go back to what he was doing. Jesus walks through every town and village, teaching, preaching, healing every disease, and in the middle of all of it he stops long enough to actually look at the people in front of him. And what he sees breaks him open.

That is where compassion starts. Not with feeling, with looking. The reason we feel so little is often that we have seen so little; we have trained ourselves to keep our eyes at the level of tasks and screens and never let them rest on a face. So today, look at one person. One. All the way. Long enough that they stop being scenery and become a soul, and let what you see begin to cost you something.