Chapter 4 - Compassion - my favorite quotes:

The chapter starts with this quote "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen".

It talks about authentic compassion - "Jesus' strategy for helping us extend authentic compassion to others is to allow us to be broken by hardship". What a way to learn authentic compassion - I feel like I'm too much of a wimp for that. "Our brokeness lets us feel what others feel, and it give us credibility when we reach out to others who are suffering." "Our wounds give us power to feel another person's pain."

"The second step in Jesus' stratgy for teaching us to extend authentic compassion to others is to give us his heart for the broken people around us." He mentions that there are two kinds of relationships in the world - I and Thou (person to person) and I and It (person to object). "Having Jesus' heart for people keeps us from turning people in our lives into it people."
"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. That's what it's like to have Jesus' heart for people."

I pray that God gives us all that kind of compassion - imagine what the world would be like if we did....