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?

My heart is very heavy with the sad news we are hearing about how the current global food crisis is affecting many of our Compassion children, their families and even some of our country staff. Although we are still attempting to determine where the greatest needs are and the number of children being most adversely affected, please know that Compassion is dedicated to doing all that we can to step up our help in this area of urgent need.

Most of us are feeling the pinch of rising prices in our own lives, but to the poor even the slightest increase can be devastating. In times like this, those of us with enough have the option of reducing what we purchase. But for the needy, who are often already trying to survive on only one meal a day, they have no option but to go hungry.

Compassion has already determined that we will be able to send additional funds to each country this month. We will put an extra $1 million in the child support pool. However, we realize that this will be offset by the growing needs for unsponsored children and the loss in purchasing power of the U.S. dollar. We will release additional funds in order to respond immediately to urgent proposals for food aid.

Please join us in this cause and consider a donation to our Global Food Crisis fund, with the hope that we can provide an even greater response to the specific needs of children in poverty in the months to come.