God Of Compassion

By Joel McKerrow

The girl stares at the ground. To afraid to raise her eyes.

To broken.
To violated
To ashamed to even try.

Her tears, a bitter river, stream down her face as she is thrown violently to the ground. Wrapped in a sheet that barely covers her body. She feels like a whore.  So many thoughts racing around her head. So many regrets. So many eyes stripping her of any sense of dignity she may have had. Naked in so many ways. Her very soul crushing under the weight of her own humiliation.

Someone so starved of love. So starved of affection.

“All I wanted was someone to notice” she thinks to herself, “All I wanted was to feel like I was someone. Like I was beautiful to someone. Like I actually was worth having around. What else could I do? What else could I do? I know it was wrong, but…what else could I do?”

    Her captors drag her through the crowd that has gathered. All attention focussed solely on this whimpering mess of a woman as she is thrown in front of the man they have just heard speaking. The men that brought her force her to stand to her feet. They say something to this man they’ve bought her to. Something that chills her to the core, making her weep violently as she struggles to hide from the stares of so many accusers.

The penalty of her crime…the death sentence.

The sound of silence fills the air as the crowd wait to see the response of this man. They have all heard how sinful she has been and they all know the punishment that this calls for. They stare down at the crushed, humiliated woman, their stares pushing her further and further into the hurt, loneliness and rejection that has wrapped around her.
Slowly the man before her stoops to the ground and begins to write with his finger. The bare ground of the temple make it hard to see what he’s writing, but still the people all around crane their necks in an attempt to catch a glimpse.

The woman finally looks up from her dejected state as she sees that all attention has been taken off her and her humiliation and onto the man in front of her as he draws on the ground. He looks up from his drawing and puts a challenge out to her condemning captors, saying, “If anyone is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”
He kneels down again and continues to draw in the dirt. Each of her condemners  sulk off slyly into the background, tails between their legs.
This man, this picture of love personified takes all of the attention onto himself as he draws on the ground until all the people have walked away, until no condemnation is left for her,

The woman who knew she was going to die a worthless piece of nothing only moments before looks into the eyes of the man who has just saved her life and sees the most intense love and compassion flowing out of them for her. She can’t believe that someone would stand up for her like that, that someone actually cared enough, that someone would not condemn her for her wasted life and actions. She begins to think that maybe, just maybe this man sees something in her that she’s never seen herself. Maybe, if he would go to all this trouble, maybe, just maybe…maybe I am someone who is worth something. Maybe there is something beautiful about me.

And from this moment, when this one man cared enough to take away the humiliation and condemnation that threatened to take her life.  When he cared enough to take the attention of the people away from her brokenness and shame. When he chooses not to condemn her but to show her true love and grace. It is then that she finally knows the love that she has been searching for all her life and makes a vow to turn from her ways and live a new life.