Compassionate Detachment
A PRACTICE FOR PRAYING IN HARD TIMES
An Overload
Right now, in the palm of your hands, you hold the ability to access information about a seemingly endless amount of human hardship. Some of it you need to go looking for, but often it’s placed on your newsfeed by someone else. Notifications, stories, ads and opinions. It’s instant, constant, and at times overwhelming. There’s never been an era of communication like it in history. There’s undoubtedly positives to the technology we have. I could list tonnes. But there’s a glaring problem: we can’t hold all of this hardship in our hearts and minds. It’s simply too much to bear.
We Have Limits
We’re finite beings. We have limits. Our capacity isn’t big enough to cope with the sum of the suffering placed before our eyes. It’s natural, even right, for us to feel out of our depth swimming in the ocean of turmoil we find around us. And, importantly; that doesn’t mean we lack empathy or compassion—it just means we’re human, and not God. When we choose to recognise our limits, we’re being faithful to the way we were made. What we really need is a practice to help us acknowledge the hardships we see, while allowing ourselves to remember our finiteness.
Casting Your Fears
We find this practice when the apostle Peter invites believers to ‘cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.’ He’s writing in a context where ‘the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings’, so it’s safe to assume both the audience and Christians widely are suffering (1 Peter 5:7-9). And what’s his encouragement? To cast—or more literally ‘throw’—their pressures and burdens onto Jesus. It means ceasing to hold the difficulties you carry. That’s not because they’re told not to care, but because the one who catches their worries has an endless capacity for caring.
Compassionate Detachment
We’ve got to release the world; with all of its crises, trauma, people, suffering and pain. We have to detach from some of it, or we’ll be overwhelmed. And it’s possible to do that with compassion, because we know the one to whom we commit them. The practice of compassionate detachment is one of saying ‘Lord, I care about this situation or person, but I don’t have the capacity to hold it. I place it in your hands, knowing you can carry it without my help. I have limits, and you are limitless. Please act in a way that is merciful, just and compassionate.’ It’s desiring the alleviation of all suffering and hardship without needing to read every update, know every detail, and always hold an opinion. Distance is not always equivalent with callousness—it can be compassionate—especially if it honours our ability to continue to care for those whom we have responsibility for.
It Doesn’t Mean
To be abundantly clear: this doesn’t equate to not caring, and burying our heads in the sand. We’ll talk about lament in a few days, and actively praying for a grieving with others in their distress. If we love Jesus, we must lament with, suffer on behalf of, and intercede for the world and our neighbours. However that can’t ever extend to every hardship, crisis, and person equally if we honour the limitations we’ve been made with.
It Does Mean
You have permission to hand things over to God, to release the flood of bad news that washes over you to him, and to have some distance between you and every struggle being faced around the world. Part of faithfully following Jesus means acknowledging you have limits on your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual capacity. It also means trusting the limitless character of God, and knowing He is big enough to carry every ounce of brokenness in this world, and we aren’t.
Practicing Compassionate Detachment
Try praying a simple prayer today that compassionately places a situation or person into the hands of God, and trust that you can continue with life knowing God holds your prayer in his hands because he cares.
