Compassion: Beginning at Home

Unapologetically, my understanding of compassion is rooted in my faith and in my relationship with Jesus.

Over the past few days, the story of Jesus’ birth—and the story of Jesus’ mother, Mary—has been working on me. Giving compassion to me in ways I didn’t expect.

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There’s an early Christian teacher—one of the wise voices from the early church—named Irenaeus. He once wrote that Mary was the one who “undid the knots of rebellion that Eve tied.”

At first, that made me furious. Of course, some man would frame a woman’s purpose as cleaning up the mess of another woman who has been turned into the poster child for sin and blame. Hard pass. I had zero interest in sitting with that.

But something nudged me back.

Sit with it.

Sit with her.

And the more I did, the more I realized what moved me wasn’t the comparison to Eve but the courage of Mary herself—a young woman with very little power, status, or protection—who still said “yes.” Not because God begged or coerced her, but because she believed in the hope Jesus would usher in and the small-but-holy part she would get to play.

Mary held the knotted mess of her world—fear, oppression, uncertainty—and she didn’t yank or tear. She simply began to untangle it. Strand by strand.

Not to clean up someone else’s mess, but because she trusted that God’s new day was worth participating in.

That reflection did something in me.

And compassion tells me that once I receive something, I’m responsible for doing something with it.

So I’m beginning at home.

With my kids—kids who have lived through floods and moves and trauma and loss. Kids who have knots of their own. I’m trying to sit on the floor with them while they play or eat spaghetti or tell me something silly, and just be there. Just listen.

Asking questions like:

“What’s been hard lately?”

“What are you looking forward to?”

And resisting the urge (GRR!) to steer the conversation where I want it to go.

Compassion also means turning toward my spouse with tenderness.

Seeing that he, too, has endured so much these past months.

Giving him space instead of expecting him to soldier on because I need him to.

If compassion begins anywhere, it must begin at home—with the people who have been entrusted to me. With the knots we all carry. With the slow, gentle, holy work of untangling them together.