The Question That Will Not Leave

"Let us not grow weary of doing good." (Galatians 6:9)

How do we sustain compassion over time? That is the question that will not leave, and it should not be made to leave. We are losing people, not to scandal, not to doubt, not to some clever argument read online. We are losing them to exhaustion. To wounds that pile up without healing. To the slow, private discovery that the thing they thought they could carry for a lifetime turned out to be unbearable after four years.

This is not written from the far side of anything. There are mornings a faithful person cannot get out of bed. There are Sundays a preacher stands in a pulpit saying words he does not feel. There are whole seasons in which someone is drowning and not one person around them can see it. If that is you, you are not the exception to the people of God. You are closer to the center of them than you think.

And here is the honest hope. It is possible to keep loving people for forty years and still be a person at the end of it. But not the way we have often been doing it, alone, unwatered, pretending the cost is not real. The sustaining does not come from gritting harder. It comes from a different economy altogether, one where the strength is drawn and not manufactured. Do not ask how to grind on longer. Ask where the life is supposed to come from, because the way most of us have been doing it was never going to last, and was never meant to.