Compassion Fatigue

Ironically today I was just checking one more blog before sitting down and writing about compassion fatigue, and that one blog, Beauty and Depravity, featured a post on a woman in a New York hospital who collapsed in a waiting room and died while no one around her offered assistance. The post also features a video. I wonder happened in that waiting room. Were the people around her so tired of helping, so tired of being in a hospital and dealing with sick people that they just were too tired to care?

My definition of compassion fatigue is what I feel when I am physically, emotionally and psychologically drained. When the sights, sounds and impressions of wanting to help others around me when their needs are too great, and I realize that I cannot solve the problem. After living in Ukraine for nine years and working with street children most of those years, it is something I occasionally feel and when I do, I know I need to pull back, rest, give myself some mental space from what I am doing and take time to recharge with God.

Since getting high speed internet and being able to reconnect with the world so to speak, I am astounded by the amount of information that is being exchanged about every nuance of life from all over the world. Now, you just don't read about a woman collapsing on the floor in a hospital and the fact that no one helped her as she died, you watch a video of the security guard and others around her ignore her. This kind of hyper scrutiny is fascinating and mind boggling to me and though some are still writing off blogging and social networks as a fad for the young, I predict that the intensity of communications in this world is only going to magnify. TV shows, blogs, YouTube videos and podcasts, all cry out with sounds and reasoning to help with every cause and problem under the sky in heaven. Compassion Fatigue is coming to the media, and to those who are watching.

In America, there has been a strong movement both in the church and in the secular public to reach out internationally and help people in poverty and in great need. Our resources and media are feeding the fuel to get involved on a personal level. They raise money and stir the emotions which then burn out when compassion fatigue arrives after people get a reality dose of the overwhelming human need. I see this in missions where some people come to Ukraine, the emotions and passions rise to make a commitment to help and then when they go back home and you never hear from them again.

Ministering long term overseas has given me a different perspective of what it takes to really help people with long term assistance rather than quick easy emotional bursts of money and time. Helping other people is not for the faint of heart and takes perseverance and commitment.

This emotional impulse or "passion" to "change the world," "abolish poverty," create world "peace" or (and I'm writing to myself here) get every child off the street, becomes a different reality when the rubber hits the road. I have had to go through some tough times coming to terms with this reality. They caused me to reach down inside to figure exactly why I am trying to help children and pull my strength from something else than my own psychological or emotional strength. If I stood only on those things, I would burn out.

I know that for me, my faith helps me enormously. To turn to the Bible to look for answers to the questions that arise as I try to live out my faith in full Technicolor has changed my life. As I Christian, I know that I can do little to change the world. Jesus already changed the world with his death on the cross. I am not likely to be able to abolish poverty, because he also said we would always have the poor living among us. The Bible says that wars are going to rage until Jesus returns so world peace is probably not something we will experience either.

Looking at reality with open eyes, isn't depressing when you are a Christian; it's freeing. I know that God is in control and he's the one who is giving me the strength to reach out and help people. The results of what I do are in his hands.