The Danger of Growing Numb to Human Suffering

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I saw a video of someone dying the other day. Scrolling my phone, Instagram’s algorithm positioned it between a video of Cesar Millan training a pit bull and one about prepping meals for the week.

Witnessing global news while it’s being made is easier than ever. Ironically, for that same reason, it’s harder than ever to care. At home and far away, we watch—often in gruesome detail—war, conflict, disaster, crises, and other injustices unfold in almost real time just inches from our noses. Only to then set our phones down and pretend all of this is normal.

I’ve spent the last two decades—most of my career—documenting humanitarian crises, disasters, socio-economic crises, and injustice, often involving children. I’ve seen and reported on my fair share of traumatic things. These are things I carry in an invisible backpack that seems to weigh a hundred pounds.

I’m guilty of feeding the algorithm, too, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my own role in reporting terrible, gut-wrenching things.

But today we are all positively drenched in this environment, saturated in constant media coverage. Understandably, many of you are suffering from compassion fatigue. It seems like every week there’s a new crisis that shreds our hearts. Many of us are suffering from compassion fatigue.

But as Christians, we cannot surrender our fight. Two of the cardinal exhortations we find in the Bible – both straight from Jesus Himself – call us to something radical. Jesus asks us to hold the whole of the world in our hearts.

More than ever, caring for the least of these seems political. It’s not. It’s biblical.

Recall the Great Commandment

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:36-40).

Jesus doesn’t stop at asking us to love God. He commands us to love our neighbor “as ourselves.”

We’ve lost just how radical this is for our lives. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see a profound challenge of who we are called to love. The traveler the Samaritan encountered wasn’t just a stranger. He was a sworn enemy.

Anyone listening to the story back then would have understood the story’s implications. Jesus calls us to a radical, global, no limits, big-hearted love that doesn’t flinch in the face of suffering.

When I first started working for Compassion International, I was overwhelmed, even paralyzed, in the face of extreme poverty. Some of my very first trips for Compassion were to West Africa, places where children and families were experiencing unimaginable suffering.

But we’re not called to solve it all. The simplicity of Jesus’ message is to meet the needs we see and can meet, to love others as we would hope to be loved, and to act purposefully without the weight and heaviness that accompanies our inability to erase all suffering perfectly.

Recall the Great Commission

We read in Matthew 28:18-20 NIV that Jesus told his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The Great Commission is central to our faith. Not accidental. The fullness of what God has called us to do includes this mission. Looking out over the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked us to take the good news forward, outward, to all people.

I wish I could bring you with me. I wish you could stand at the mouth of the Simón Bolívar Bridge in Colombia and see women cut off their hair for a few dollars. I wish you could meet the children who survived the Rwandan Genocide, coloring their trauma with crayons. I wish I could take you to Malawi so you could see the impact of drought ripple through communities that have no food to eat. I wish you could go to Thailand and meet the children and families along the border who are stuck in limbo, caught between conflict and being stateless.

This suffering is almost impossible to watch. But we must not cower, because the Great Commandment and the Great Commission are very much our concern.

Engage intentionally, and always with your calling—and your legacy—in mind

This is daunting. I know. Don’t be overwhelmed. Carefully reflect on what you’re capable of doing and how you can do it. Awareness is not meaningful engagement. You have to care, and then you have to act.

Sit down and take inventory of what God has given you, in terms of your giftings, personality, resources, and skills. There are no accidents in how God made you. If you’re strong, He’s made you strong to defend the weak. If you’re brave, He’s made you brave for those who are afraid. Think about the causes and issues God has embedded in your heart. Hold those carefully, and let them shape how and where you serve.

Carry God’s word close. Keep your heart soft. Look to the horizon. And then, move.

Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/Paul Hanaoka

Ryan Johnson is Global Story Director for Compassion International. For the past 16 years, he has used the power of story to stir people’s hearts toward action, documenting humanitarian crises, disasters, and issues affecting children living in extreme poverty.