Out on duty on the Junior Campus on Monday, there was a familiar pattern of students wanting to show me their latest trick on the monkey bars or their sandpit creation, band aids to hand out for minor wounds, and the urgent rush of students telling me of an injury to a classmate. In the last case, we duly arrived at the scene of the accident to find a student surrounded by a group of friends providing consolation.
The injury was not a bad one and the student was quickly consoled but it was the compassionate response of friends that interested me. They had quickly organised themselves into a group to go and get help and a group to stay with their friend to assist. What a beautiful picture of care and concern.
“Acting with compassion is a response of the human ......”
Acting with compassion is a response of the human heart that separates the selfish and self-serving from an ‘other-focussed’ concern. The word ‘compassion’ comes from Latin and means ‘to suffer with’. My family were talking about this in our devotion last night. The idea that we would feel another’s pain or hurt to the point of ‘suffering with’ them is a powerful way to understand care and genuine concern. It is also an incredible picture of God’s concern for mankind shown through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, not only did he ‘suffer with’ humanity, he also ‘suffered for’ humanity.
Being compassionate is one of our Learner Attributes, asking our students to ‘learn and act in ways that demonstrate concern for others’ or simply to ‘show kindness’. It is always a beautiful thing to see compassion in action. The Apostle Paul, writing in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 paints a picture of the influence of God’s compassion on our lives and actions, he writes: ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God’.
If you have heard a recent news broadcast or picked up a newspaper, it would have been easy to feel that our world suffers from a distinct lack of compassion. In a world of suffering, inexplicable cruelty and distress, God calls us to be people of compassion in response to his compassion for us. What a great privilege to say of our students that they are ‘compassionate’.
Scott Ambrose - Principal
