Compassion Fatigue

 

Ezekiel 5:15

The nations that are around you will ridicule you and laugh at you. When I punish you because of my anger, fury, and fierce revenge, you will become something ridiculed and something horrible. I, the Lord, have spoken.

 

Thought for the day – Compassion fatigue

I wonder how Ezekiel must have felt getting these prophecies. Living in Babylon, far away from Jerusalem, he was getting prophecies about things that were happening in real time to people that he probably knew and cared about. And yet even here, God was asking Ezekiel to say things to the people of Jerusalem that would have no doubt hurt him and made him worry.

 

I don't think we can ever understand what Ezekiel was going through. Knowing that what he was prophesying was coming true and then hearing reports of the prophecies coming true.

 

And while we are never going to be in Ezekiel's position, I wonder how we respond to bad news coming from faraway places. Sometimes I think we develop something called compassion fatigue. A situation where we just cannot be bothered with anybody else's difficult circumstances, particularly those far away that don't really impact us.

 

A good example is the Ukrainian war. To be honest, I'm not sure we really care about the Ukrainian war as much as we did when it first started. And yet there are still people dying on the front lines. There are still people dying in drone attacks and missile attacks. There are Christian pastors being challenged because of the stand they take against Russia or against Ukraine for that matter. Last week we saw the cathedral in Kyiv bombed.

 

Have we developed compassion fatigue? Quite possibly. And maybe we need to be asking God to forgive us for that. Maybe we need to be asking God to renew our hearts so that we can show compassion to those who need it most again.