Outsourcing Compassion

In his typically Questing Parson style, the post Looking for Compassion tells of the parson waiting to preach at a large church when a woman comes up in need of travel money. He talks to her of her need to get to her son who has just died and then tries to solve the problem at a church where he is the guest preacher. The Parson writes,

A few doors down he found a several men in an office. They were counting money. One of the men was the layman who’d first brought Edna to the parson. “I’m sorry to bother you folks,” said the parson. “But that lady in the parlor is in a bad fix. She needs a little gas to get to the place where her son just died. Do you have some kind of fund for that?”

“I don’t think we do parson.” said one. They continued counting.

“Looks like you’ve got a few hundred dollars in that stack,” said the parson.

“We took in a good bit in the Sunday school collection today,” said another.

“How about parting with a little of that? I could give it to the lady and your pastor, after the service, can work out the details with you.”

“I don’t think we could do that, parson,” said the man who’d brought Edna to him. “We have certain accounting procedures here.”

It ends with an ultimatum of

One of us is going to take the lady and get her help and one of us is going to preach at the service. You decide who’s doing what.

Then the senior pastor returns

the church’s pastor appeared rushing down the hall, pulling on his robe as he hurried along.

“Sorry, I got tied up, parson. Hope you got to know the folks.”

“I did,” said the parson.

“What do you think?”

“I think they outsource compassion,” said the parson.

If you liked my Reader's Digest version, you'll like his full text even better at Looking for Compassion.

By the way, we do have a fund for that sort of thing at King of Peace and provide more than $10,000 in direct aid in our community. But how do we Christians outsource compassion? In what ways do we show compassion on our own?