Three years fly by in a heartbeat. If you have children, you know. Years that seemed so long and boring as a child, are gone in a flash in adult time. This is why it is so interesting to me to study the way Jesus used his three short years of ministry. He had a monumental job to accomplish in such a short time-frame! Yet many, if not most of the accounts in the Bible are of personal one-on-one interactions. Jesus never hurried and surprisingly, Jesus didn’t choose the most popular and powerful people to build his ministry.

Jesus spent his limited time with lost, lonely people who society rejected. He interacted with each of those people as if they were the most important person on earth. He had a massive job to spread the Gospel to an entire world for all eternity, had three years to do it, and yet he chose to spend his time one-on-one with lepers, widows, women with questionable pasts, liars, cheats and all around insignificant ordinary folks. Why did Jesus use this approach?

This leads me to the Greek title of this blog, Splagchnizomai. I know. This sounds like a word Mary Poppins invented. But according to my source, Lisa Harper, it means “from the gut compassion”. As I understand it, it was used in Mark 1:40-41 to explain why Jesus stopped to heal the leper. Jesus was driven with compassion for the leper who was a forgotten outcast of society. In Jesus’ personal encounters in the Bible, he gave his full attention to each individual as if they were the only person around. He didn’t stop to look at the clock counting down the moments he had left on earth then rush on to the next big preaching event. He took his time with people. And this is one of the many upside-down, counterintuitive ways that Jesus worked.

So what if we applied this same approach to our short life’s story? What if we valued our one-on-one time with people and spent less time trying to scratch and claw our way to a place with more influence? What if we quit worrying about how big, how powerful, or how orderly our life is and start each day with caring for each individual in which we come into contact, whether we deem them worthy or not? What if we made time for others and valued every encounter as holy and ordained by God?

My biggest block to this approach is that I don’t have it in me to love like Jesus with that kind of compassion. Nope, I just don’t have that. Anything I did would be contrived. So first, I must realize deep within my soul that Jesus loves me even though I’m not the prettiest, smartest or most popular person in the room. He doesn’t measure with the same stick that we humans use. He measures with splagchnizomai. He measures with his compassion and not my worthiness. It is so hard to imagine that Jesus would stop what he is doing to tend to me, yet he has never in my life of 64 years ever let me go. He has held me through my darkest night. It is his love and not mine that does the trick. Nothing depends on me.

So all I need to do is to keep my eyes on Him and let go of my earthly ideas of ministry. God did not create me to be another Billy Graham. I will not cure cancer. I will not solve the homeless crisis. He created me and placed me with those he chose for me to love. I must trust his plan. My role is to let Him love through my attention and presence, one person at a time.