Today’s Life-Line is:

In his book Night, Elie Wiesel wrote about his horrifying childhood experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. Having gone without food or drink for three days. thousands of Jews were driven out of their barracks at dawn into a thickly falling snow and herded into a field. Forbidden to sit or even move much, they stood in line until evening, waiting for a train that would take them deeper into Germany. The snow drifted in a layer on their shoulders.

Finally, their thirst intolerable, one man suggested that they eat the snow, but they weren’t allowed by the guards to bend over. The person in front of the man agreed to let him eat the snow that had accumulated on the back of his shoulders, however. That act spread through the line until there, in a frozen field, what had been individuals struggling with their separate pain became a community sharing their suffering together.

The waiting heart arrives at the truth of compassion: that we’ll survive as a human family only as we’re willing, one by one, to become the place of nourishment for our brother and sister. We’ll survive as we cease being individuals struggling alone with our pain and become instead a community sharing our suffering in a great and holy act of compassion.

Sue Monk Kidd, from When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions