Remember when I told you about my new job? I’ve been doing it for several months now and so I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty good grip on things. Well … as good a grip as one can have on a job that depends entirely on world events. And oh my word, the world has been eventful lately, hasn’t it?

One of the first things I do each day when I get to work is open up six world news websites. I browse each site for headlines about our 24 field countries to get an idea of what kind of crises I might be reporting that week.

When I’m reading through the headlines, I sometimes get the surreal feeling that I’m getting a tiny glimpse into God’s view of this world. For a few moments, my perspective shifts from my self-centered, ego-centric worldview to one where we are simply a severely broken and hurting creation in desperate need of redemption.

Right now in the United States, we are practically smothered with political ads and news reports about the faltering economy, but really these “issues” pale in comparison to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Besides the global food crisis (which you’ve probably heard about by now) here’s an idea of what our staff and children on the other side of the globe are currently facing:

• Thailand and Bolivia are both dealing with political unrest and violent protests of the current government.
• Haiti and the Dominican Republic are struggling to recover from four successive hurricanes.
• The Philippines has faced violent political conflict.
• India is in the midst of serious and deadly religious conflicts between Hindus and Christians.
• Burkina Faso has recently had heavy rains and flooding throughout the country.
• Bangladesh is dealing with continual flooding.

I’m sure there will be more bullet points to add tomorrow. It’s difficult to read the same kinds of headlines day after day, reporting over and over the non-stop fighting, corruption and scandal happening in every corner of the globe. But more than depressing me, it makes me angry. I know who is ultimately responsible for the evil in this world, and I hate him. But I also know it will end someday, and I know how it will end.

And this is what keeps me going.

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I used to work on the web team, which meant that writing for the blog was part of my actual job description. But God made it clear to me that He had other plans, and now a month later, here I am working on the International Communications team. Basically, my new job is to be the communication link between our field countries (where the kids live) and the partner countries (where the sponsors live) when a crisis occurs.

A crisis is anything from a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake, to a man-made one like civil unrest or war. It might be a bus accident, or a building collapsing, or a shooting, or a volcanic eruption … any event that affects a group of children in our programs. Because of the volatile nature of the developing countries where we work, crises occur frequently.

Unless you are Super-sponsor and check out the crisis update page daily, you probably are unaware of the wide variety of dangers our children face. I know I was. Even as an employee, it’s hard for me to keep up with all the events occurring around the world. It just seems like an unending list of prayer requests.

And it’s been easy for me to be more or less ignorant.

Except now the crisis reports are coming to my inbox. I’m the first one to find out if dengue fever is killing the kids in our program. I get the news if one of our projects has been looted and destroyed. I’m the person who first hears of children dying in a flood or a mudslide. When a crisis occurs, it’s my job to get accurate information to you as quickly as possible.

It’s a huge responsibility. Even as I write this, I’m overwhelmed by the responsibility God has placed on me and the trust that you place in me (and all of us who work for Compassion.) I take this responsibility seriously.

For the sake of the children we serve, I hope my job is extremely unexciting … boring even. The way the world has been lately, though, I have a feeling things will just get worse.

While this new position is emotionally heavy, I have hope because I am confident that none of this is outside of God’s control. He is not surprised by the crises. Only saddened, at times, by our response. We as Compassion employees, and you as sponsors, have been specifically appointed to be miracle-workers for children in poverty all over the world.

What a calling, huh?

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Have you ever repeated a word over and over in your head so many times that it eventually loses its meaning and starts to sound like nonsense? It happened to me the other day with the word “lemon.”

I said lemon so many times that it started to sound like a word I made up. Or like a word from a foreign language. After a while, the word “lemon” was meaningless — it no longer represented a tangy, yellow fruit. It was just a funny sounding nonsense word running through my head.

I think Satan likes to use a similar technique to get us to stop caring about the hurting people of the world.

Whenever we make an emotional connection to someone in need, we are motivated to act. So by getting us to feel disconnected from a certain group of hurting people, he gets us to stop acting on behalf of those who need help. One of the ways he does this is through what’s been called “compassion burnout” or “compassion fatigue.”

When a major crisis happens, the news media often reports it so quickly and intensely that for a time, it’s pretty much impossible to get away from it.

Remember watching TV the week after September 11, 2001? No matter where I looked, I couldn’t escape the horrific images. Those first few days, I couldn’t watch the news without crying. But after a while, I had heard the same stories reported so many times that they no longer affected me the way they did at first. I got used to the horror. I got numb.

Were any of you in this same boat with me? Maybe for you it was the coverage from Hurricane Katrina. Or the Asian tsumani. Or the earthquake in China. Or the Global Food Crisis. The list seems endless, doesn’t it?

This article, recently posted on urbana.org, addesses the idea of compassion burnout.

What do you do when you’ve heard something so many times that you get fatigued … you’re tired of helping, tired of giving, tired of caring?

How do you keep from getting overwhelmed with the desperate needs of the poor or numb to their pleas for help? How do you not get discouraged by the never-ending necessity for compassion?

The article includes several good suggestions for preventing burnout.

But what I’d love to know is how you deal with this on a personal level. Are there things we can do in bringing the needs of the poor to your attention that will help create the emotional connection and keep our stories from getting stale?

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