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I am a pastor and a clinical psychotherapist. My life's passion is defining healthiness from a human perspective and paralleling it to the holiness of God, divine perspective. Shifting perspectives creates a paradigm that is alongside of rather than over and against. The parakalein of God and the paradoxes of humanity are redefined. Humanity is all about winning and yet we are losing ground everywhere. Divinity is all about letting go of the desire to win and the fear of loss. The Divine embraces the world with loving care regardless of anything.

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Compassion Unveiled

Posted by Don Paine

Years ago I always thought that when God came into the garden of Eden after Adam and Eve together ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was full of wrath and they were deserving of punishment.  The part of me that thought that way saw punitive angry God.

Today, my perception is different.  From a heart that has been healed of its hurt, anger and punitiveness I see with clarity full and complete compassion.

Humanity did one wrong thing.  That part of humanity was seen through the lens of God's love and grace not thru the lens of human anger, hurt, and punitiveness.  Thankfully God is not like us.  When we see God as God is, God invites us to become more like God is.

God sees the part that reached for something out of a desire to not miss anything.  So what humanity missed was that we already had all we needed inside we just did not know it so were not satisfied.  Dissatisfaction with what we had and desire for more couples together to create "unhappiness and discontentment".  God on the other hand was and is eternally and internally happy and content regardless of anything. God enters the Garden that Day as God is, full of peace and love, contentment and compassion.  The apostle Paul years later would speak of this state as what we all can mature into, "Godliness with Contentment as great gain".  It shifts perspective form the stuff that happens to the source of contentment and compassion inside.  Had Adam and Eve been able to step out of their hiding, punitive and self punitive parts they would have known the presence of the God of Love and Compassion.

So God stepped out of the human role of judgment, hurt, and punishment into the role of compassion and care.  God asked, "What can I do to help them, who I created, to be more appreciative of all that I have given them?  They had taken all God had provided for their being for granted as they did what they thought they needed to do.  They shifted from "human beings" to "human doings".  They shifted from enjoying who they are to "doing something" to feel better about who they were.  What happened is that what they did made them feel bad about who they are/were.  In doing they sacrificed their being.  So what they needed to learn is how to sacrifice their doing and embrace their being.

The doing of Adams work once a delight was now going to be hard work.  The doing of Eve's birthing would now be with pain.  This was not as many have interpreted it to be out of anger and punishment but as a way of helping Adam and Eve to learn to never take anything for granted, to increase appreciation through hard work and pain.  So the entreatments and instrument of work, pain and suffering are intentionally present in life not to create a negative or punitive presence but to invite us to appreciate and embrace all the experiences of life with contentment and Godly perspective.

Compassion is the key always and in everything.  Compassion is the quality of the image of God in us all and when we unveil compassion we see through the lens of compassion not only a different world but with difference we live in the world.  We live as beings who do, not as doers constantly frustrated in our being.

Just as faith without works is dead and works without faith is meaningless so too doing without being is dead so being without doing is lifeless.

Be all God made you to be full of grace and compassion and you will do all that God wants you to do in and with compassion, contentment.  The veil, of the temple and in our eyes, once removed allows the lens of compassion to be visible.

The cross, the intersection of being and doing, is the Garden of Eden (Man's doing/God's being), and the Garden of Gethsemane (God's being/ Man's doing).  The Cross invites all to step from the well of pain and suffering into the well of compassion.  The well of compassion is already in us and will spring up into internal and eternal compassion (John 4).

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