Good Samaritans

We are all on a road; maybe not the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, but a road none the less. And, the road we are on is the road of life. I wish I could tell you that the road is safe, I wish I could tell you that there is nothing that will harm you; but, I can't. Because the road of life is infested with thieves, thieves that will rob you of your hope, your faith, your joy... Thieves that will break your heart and leave you for dead. I'm afraid that there is nothing that can be done about the thieves. There are just way too many of them. And besides that, they wear cloaks of hypocrisy that prevent their detection.
In the parable, the good Samaritan is one who has not been attacked by thieves. But the sad truth is, on the road of life thieves have caught up with everybody at least once. All of us have wounds, all of us have scars, all of us have been robbed of some piece of ourselves. But, the most valuable thing we posses is the one thing no thief can take away and that is our compassion. Yet, we treat compassion as if it were a gold bar that needs to stay locked up in our hearts. Never showing it to anyone for fear that we will lose it. But, the thing is; compassion not shown is lost already. Like the religious men who walked by on the other side of the road; we walk by each other everyday. Knowing that thieves have done their wicked deeds, showing hardly the slightest glimmer of compassion for one another.
Wounds of the heart are like wounds of the flesh. At the first sight of blood our instinct is to look away in disgust and avoid getting any of that blood on us. But, the instinct of compassion is different. When one we love bleeds we don't care how much blood we get on us, we don't avoid the situation. We just do whatever we can to help, even if we really don't know how.
I knew a man once, he's dead now. But, he is a perfect example of compassion. One day his friend had a horrible accident and was bleeding so bad that he was suffocating on his own blood. And out of compassion, this man sucked the blood out of his friends lungs with the only thing that he had available; his mouth. It saved his friends life.
Wounds of the heart may not bleed, but they are just as messy. And we can not act with compassion without getting some "blood" on us.
More than anything else, my vision for our community is that we are a people given to compassion. More than anything else, I want to be part of a community of Good Samaritans.