These days shepherds, or laborers, won’t make the nightly news because good news doesn’t sell as well. News sources from Colbert Report to Drudge Report won’t tell you how the people let their compassion spill out their heart, hands, and feet. About how people relentlessly pursue the lost in their community by meeting their needs, like Jesus did.
“Jesus went throughout… healing every disease and every affliction.”
About how they paid someone else’s mortgage or showed up with enough food to feed a family for a month. You won’t know about the late-night visits, the shared tears, the intercessory prayers while on their knees.
Those are the stories we will hear on the other side of heaven.
But on this side, Jesus says there’s still so much more of the harvest than of the workers. And this is something that Colbert and Drudge can both agree on: not enough is being done.
But when you look around, we all seem so… busy. I can’t tell you anyone with a significant amount of extra time on their hands.
So it begs the question: are we putting our best efforts into the harassed, helpless, and hopeless or into people who already have their seat at the banquet of Christ? Or are we spending our time, talent, and treasures on other laborers? If 70% of America identifies as Christian, then… what exactly is going on?
This is the truth: All people are valuable, each and every last one. But God’s not grieved over the laborers like He is over the lost harvest.
There’s more of an urgency here than there is for anything else. Because if we don’t show up, or we show up when it’s convenient for us but ultimately too late, someone lives apart from God for all of eternity.
And as Christians, that’s something we simply aren’t okay with.
Therefore: no one is unreachable, no one is too far gone, no one is ever the enemy. They’re just not yet reached, just within reach, or a victim of the enemy.
Friend, you are so called to shepherd. Your capacity for compassion is otherworldly.
May those of us who have been shepherded well shepherd others well until the day we must give an account of how well we shepherded.
Kingdom work. There’s a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it. And that’s ok, because our capacity for compassion is otherworldly. What a time to be alive, Church!