Compassion: sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings/misfortunes of others
Kindness: quality of being friendly, generous (showing a readiness to give more of something than is strictly necessary or expected), and considerate.

After a week where time was scarce and there was not enough of me to meet all the surrounding expectations, I breathe in this morning and remember the completeness of Easter – that which can never be achieved through human effort nor can it be lost despite of it.  So for this sixth week of Easter, I pause in my reflections to be close to the vine, trusting that the “more” to give can only be born from the vine and tended by the Good Gardener.

This Mother’s Day weekend, I revel in these gifts that keep me grounded and every growing…

“Caring for children requires deep reserves of energy, extended periods of patience, and a heightened intellectual activity that seldom has been recognized as such. Morever, the spiritual potential of living with children comes only when the spirituality of everyday life is recognized, affirmed, and attended to as being equally worth with fasting and praying.  Then, the sometimes tedious, sometimes wondrous intricacies of ‘caring labor’ for another – dressing, nursing, feeding, cleaning, wiping, brushing, guarding, protecting, reprimanding, teaching, watching, following, listening, mediating, responding, and anointing the head of a child – teaches something nameless that is nonetheless essential to life and living.  In caring for a child, as in caring intimately for any human being, one may glimpse the divine within creation…

Somehow, through the mutual understanding practiced over and over in the minute moments of attachment with a dependent, developing person, one who has struggled to care for a vulnerable, yet resilient child gains new empathy for other children, for one’s spouse, for parents, for the oppressed. One begins to behold the vulnerable, yet resilient child in all people.” – Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore in her amazing Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, 158