Compassion - the Art of Visiting

When the sermon was preached from book of JOB two weeks back, I gave more careful thoughts to it and I felt it was a very cruel book, because I imagined it happened to me.

In this imagination, I try to fathom how would and could Job actually ‘feel’. Frankly, with my best imagination of all the human experience and the full repertoire of emotions, I still find it hard to think how Job is able to say how he feels.

When anyone comes to visit me, I don’t want him to come with his own agenda… I often get the feeling that before people enter my room, they try to decide what to say. I don’t want to hear their concerns. I want them to empty their heads of their own ideas. When you visit a sick, fill your head with thoughts about that person, your care for him… If you just go in and listen, they will do all the “saying” because they really want to talk about themselves. They need to get in touch with their feelings and they need to tell it to another human.
(The Art of Visiting - Under the Caring Eye of God, Joyce Hugget)


We may not have a friend who suffered like Job to visit. But we do have a unique ministry at the Saturday Service.

My first visitor encouraged me in this way. This visitor, the priest I mentioned in an earlier chapter, so radiated calm and peace and the presence of Christ that, when I reflected on the visit after he had gone I concluded that, instead of rushing from the Underground station into my room, as I would have been tempted to do, he must have prepared himself prayerfully for this visit. I learned that later that he had, indeed, slipped into the chapel for a few minutes of quiet before visiting a patient on the Fourth place and then me.
In the solitude of the chapel, had my friend prepared himself in a similar way? Was this the reason why everything he said and did seemed to be shot through with the strengthening love of Christ? Is there a lesson for me to learn?


In the hectic lifestyle we adopt, we have so little time and energy left. We are mostly numb and drained. Thus we need dramatic incidents, overwhelming experiences, peak emotions and powerful moments for us to be tugged (the Charity shows, the people begging at the MRTs). We have become desensitized to be able to feel. Are we still able to carve out a margin for compassion?

The word compassion is derived from the Latin words pati and cum, which together mean “to suffer with”. Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish… Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.


If my Lord is a compassionate God, do I know He is suffering with me right now?