Several years back, a few of us in the church I attended, started talking about how we might help our church better engage in the area of compassion ministry. Not just loving our neighbors, but loving them well. This is how I met Amanda. She approached me after a class I taught on the subject and it didn’t take long to read between the lines of her questions or the lines on her face. The strain of hard circumstances and poor decisions were painted deep.
Amanda’s marriage was on the brink of divorce, her children were struggling academically and emotionally, her health was visibly poor, and her finances were a mess. In short, Amanda was a heap of complicated needs that all seemed to melt together with any attempt to address just one. 
Helping Amanda – loving her as my neighbor – would require a lot of shoulder-to-shoulder work, and not the kind you can do in one day or in tennis shoes. This would take weeks, months, even years. It would require work boots – the kind you choose because of their steel toes, extra support and lifetime warranty.
This shouldn’t surprise us. The road of our own transformation and the ongoing process of sanctification is just that – daily, lifelong, and often difficult. But it is also filled with grace, increasing the beauty of the goal – to become like Christ.
Unfortunately, today some of our best efforts at compassion are merely quick fixes. We hear a story like Amanda’s and we pour resources in along with a short spurt of support. With such actions we have too often turned to the duct tape of relief rather than the plaster and hard work of restoration. We all want quick fixes, even when we know that life doesn’t work that way.
Many people had attempted to help Amanda over the years, each one starting out with the good intentions of a day laborer hired to patch a small hole. In some way, they did provide a glimpse of hope and some temporary relief. But rain is inevitable and failure to address the problem behind the wall means that the hole will reappear and sometimes, even larger the next time around.
Restoration is never quick and is rarely easy. But the finished work, with all of the joy and beauty it brings, is worth it. Our hope is in the finished work of Christ, the very hope that brings depth to the meaning of loving our neighbor. This is the hope that ushers in true compassion, not mere sentimentality. This true compassion accompanies us when we recognize that we, too, are a work in progress, pressing in to the patient and faithful Master-restorer, who never abandons. We learn to love well when we realize that we are loved well.