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Compassion is I think one of the purest emotions we have. It is when we are no longer thinking about anything but how someone else feels or what someone else thinks. It is when we put away all of our own concerns and problems for the moment and care only for another. Compassion is not charity but rather what compels us to a charitable act.

The opposite of compassion is selfishness. It is what gets in the way and blocks our empathy for the people around us. It happens, its human nature. You've had a hard day, you're dog tired, nothing is going right and you see a homeless person on the corner shaking a cup of coins. When we are blocked by our own problems, our first impulse might be to tell the guy to get a job. "Hey dude, if you can stand there all day and shake a cup, you can serve French fries. I'm working and getting my butt kicked, why can't you?" It happens, our eyes are blinded by our own problems and we are not seeing his. We lead complicated and sometimes frustrating lives and it is so easy to sometimes not see what is going on around us. When watching the news sometimes, I wonder if there is any compassion left in the world. We have pointless wars, hate crimes, battered spouses, abused and missing children and politicians who seem to forget just who they are working for. We are lied to, pandered and manipulated and treated like stupid children by people who are suppose to know better. I watch the news sometimes and think "What's the point? No one cares about us anymore."

Well the point is the News only tells part of the story. Let me give you some examples of real compassion.

After Katrina hit leaving thousands of people homeless, literally thousands of people came from all over the country to do what ever they could to help relieve the devastation. Companies gave clothing and supplies, builders donated there time and skills, doctors and nurses treated the sick. The whole country came together in one huge act of compassion to ease the devastation.

That was a grand act of compassion but just as important are the small ones. A man I know worked in a job he hated. He would come home tired and broken down but nobody knew. His grandson caught him one day coming home from work tired and broken. Before he came to the house, he stopped, straightened himself out, took a deep breath and put a smile on his face and went into the house. He would rather suffer in silence than let his family see his pain. What he was doing was for them and he didn't want them to feel

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