The needs of the world overwhelm me. Am I too sensitive?

1919 279 4. Prayer confers the largest power of doing good to others. "What am I to do with other people's sorrows?" The finest and the gentlest spirits are often the most heavily burdened. Many a one feels that he could pass right easily through the world if he had no griefs to carry but his own. He feels that his sensitive system is just a contrivance for catching up other men's calamities, an apparatus on which everybody fastens his own peculiar vexation his family their's — his neighbours their's — till at last he moves about, the burden-bearer of a groaning world. But after he has got himself thus charged and loaded, he knows not what to do, for he cannot alleviate the twentieth portion of the ills he knows. He cannot heal all the wounds and mitigate all the poverty of which he is the mourning witness. He cannot minister to all the minds diseased, all the aching hearts and wounded spirits whose confidant he is and in the anguish of his own tortured sympathies, he is sometimes tempted to turn these sympathies outside in, and feel for his fellow-men no more.

"What then shall I do with other people's sorrows?" The Christian feels that he has no right to be his own little all-in-all. He feels that he dares not invert the example of his Master, who was a man of sorrows very much because a man of sympathies. He remembers of whom it is said, "Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows"; and this reminds him what to do with the perplexities and disappointments and distresses of his brethren. He takes them to the throne of grace. He deposits them in the ear of the Great High Priest. He urges them on the notice of One who can be touched with a feeling of infirmity, and Who is able to succour them that are tempted.

What human mind can conceive the immensity of misery that exists upon this globe? The very thought of suffering on a large scale so overwhelms the mind that it grasps it not, and so it is easier to consider it than the detailed misery of one misfortune. We feel compassion, and are moved to tears, over one starving child; we hear of famines and of thousands perishing, and fail to grasp the meaning of the words. But every sigh, every sorrow, every pain — every detail of each grief over the whole face of His creation is known to God, and the cry thereof rises up to Him.

When the soul is distressed or cast down, that is not sin in itself. But sin comes in when there is distrust of God.

And let no one think or say this is insensibility; superiority to that which presses upon your heart, is surely not to be insensible to it; but it is one thing to have sorrow rolling over you like a great wave, above which your head is never lifted, it is another thing to find in Christ that which sustains and uplifts the soul in the darkest day, when death has spread its sable mantle over all the heart could prize. I feel convinced that God intended us to feel the sorrow, and I am persuaded that the deepest acquaintance with Christ, and what He is in such an hour, is in nowise inconsistent with keen feeling.

If I have the love of Christ in my heart, can I look on a world that is under Satan's power, and not be a man of sorrows? We have joy through Christ, if you take that side. If a holy being is in a world of sin, he must suffer; if a loving person is in a world of misery, he must suffer.

In the meantime we are called to "suffer with Him". Other Scriptures speak of suffering for Him on account of our testimony. Here it is the common lot of all believers to suffer with Him, implying that we feel with Him the sorrows of the world that we are passing through. When here He felt in His spirit the sorrow and the pain, the hunger and the want, the sickness and the distress that sin had brought into the world. He was touched with compassion, He sighed deeply because of the hardness of men; He wept over sinners and wept with saints. If led by the Spirit we shall feel in our little measure, even as He felt, not merely with human sympathy but with Divine compassion.

Christ's heart was moved when He saw sorrow. He would not have us cold and indifferent to it, nor yet, on the other hand, selfishly affected by it, but full of tenderness and compassion towards those who are suffering. "He has set us an example that we should follow his steps."

But, alas! in us there is too often such a getting into communion with the sorrow itself, such a turning of our souls to the thoughts of sorrow, as to lead to the distrusting God's competency to meet it. For, instead of saying, "In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul," we are turning about in the multitude of our thoughts to think what is to be done, and thus looking at and occupying ourselves about circumstances, or what we find within us, so as to keep God out altogether; but this was never the case with the Lord Jesus. For the moment the hour of sorrow appeared before His soul, the immediate cry was, "Father, save me from this hour." But if we are thinking about our own weakness in any other way than to lead us to immediate dependence upon the strength of God, God with us and God for us, it is unbelief.

Again: Are they respecting the condition of things around? We may have sorrow of spirit on this account, as conscious of the evil, misery, and ruin in which every thing is (as Jesus - He "groaned in spirit, and was troubled"); but it is impossible, when we are abiding in the sense of God's presence for any thing, be it what it may, even the state of the Church, to shake us; for we count on God, and then all things become but a sphere and scene for the operation of His grace.

A great lesson is here! We live and serve in the midst of a suffering creation, and the suffering increases with the growing violence of men: but are our hearts really moved by the serious universal need? God's heart yearns over the masses, young and old, but do our hearts yearn in sympathy with Him? It is terribly possible to become formal and stereotyped in our service, and thus to serve out of harmony with the One who has sent us. Let us seek to keep near the heart of the God of infinite compassion.