You know how the disciples felt when the crowds showed up...

• The two of you haven't had a night out without the kids in weeks. You finally get away. The waiter has just brought your appetizer when the baby-sitter calls and tells you the youngest has a high fever and has started throwing up.
• You've been planning this vacation for six months. Your reservations are all made and three days before you are scheduled to go your mother calls and says your Dad is going to have a quadruple bypass as soon as the doctors can get his sugar stabilized.
• You haven't had a day off in three weeks. Friday morning your sister calls, says her father-in-law has died and wonders if you could take her kids for the weekend.
• It has been a very long day. You woke up before dawn because your arthritis hurt so much. You had to go to the grocery store and take your dog to the vet and on the way home your car started to act up and you had to leave it at the garage and get a taxi to take you home.
• All you want to do is go to bed when the phone rings and it's your friend who lost her husband last month and she just needs somebody to talk to.

And always, when we think we have given all we have to give there is always more need: the starving people in the midst of a famine; refugees from war; the devastation of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes; to say nothing of our neighbors in our community who are hungry; the children who need someone to care about them; the youth in our community who have nowhere to go and nowhere to grow; and that pee-wee team that needs a new coach.

Yes, we know how the disciples felt. Matthew doesn't have to tell us. We know that they felt frustrated and maybe even angry. Matthew doesn't have to tell us how the disciples felt. He does have to tell us how Jesus felt. He felt "compassion" for the crowd. That is, he felt what they felt. He felt the pain and desperation that would drive people to come so far to such an inconvenient place in the hope that they might find healing for their bodies and spirits and maybe even some meaning for their lives.

I'm not asking you to be a spiritual superman. We will obviously always be more like the disciples than we are like Jesus, but that's not our calling. Let us be more like Jesus. In every way. That's my prayer.