compassion.exe

[content warning: medical trauma, animal death, gore, suicidal ideation]

My prayers have always been private. They’re whispered from the corners of a crowded mind, rambled in monologues that fade into nonsense with the arrival of sleep, or sung off-key from the driver’s seat. But this time I felt I needed to send something more professional: printed on corporate stationary in whatever sterile font Microsoft Teams is made of, a document that demanded the attention of an official inquiry.

Hello God, this is Mckenzie from the Methodist department, employment start date of 1997. Due to unsustainable working conditions, I would like to submit a request to have the software Compassion removed from my system. The program is having an adverse effect on the functionality of other applications, causing decreased productivity throughout the network. Thank you in advance for your assistance in this matter.

I was sitting in the sanctuary on Sunday, wondering how to get such a letter onto God’s work desk, when the sun came filtering through the century-old stained glass window above the organ. The colorful art depicted Jesus, kneeling in prayer, peaceful and serene.

The urge nearly overcame me to throw a rock through that window and shatter it to pieces; I wanted to rip one of the thick old hymnals from the pew in front of me and hurl it with all my strength at the shining light glittering down into the worship service. I wanted something as heavy as my heart to smash through the Savior’s stupid, perfect face.

My pastors throughout my life always told me that it’s okay to be angry at God. But this wasn’t anger. Anger is red-hot and rushes like whitewater. This was… cold, still, hopeless; ice breaking beneath my feet, ash from a wildfire stifling every breath of air, the sinking feeling in the slow-motion moment before a car accident when you realize there’s nothing you can do.

Federal funding for the university I work at was taken hostage. One of my best friends was terminated from a job he’d dedicated his life to for almost a decade, and another was thrust into a “reorganized” position of calling our state’s most vulnerable people – refugees, pregnant women, parents of children with disabilities, people in poverty – to tell them their resources were being cut off. Already-scarce healthcare for my family was put behind a higher paywall, followed by another, and another. An unhoused diabetic who lived in the quad behind my church started to deteriorate when he ran out of insulin. Everyone scrambled to make arrangements to renew his prescription at a doctor’s appointment on Friday; he died Thursday night.

One after another: injustice, oppression, violence, steamrolling an already-broken heart without nearly enough emotional stamina to endure it.

I was operating on my last iota of strength. It took everything in me to get myself from one moment to the next, dragging my exhausted soul trapped in an even more exhausted body to the postal service annex to mail a stack of letters for work, where I watched as a stray cat was struck repeatedly in the busy arterial road. I stumbled across the parking lot into the oncoming traffic, pain pouring from somewhere inside me that I didn’t even know existed, and knelt by him on the asphalt. I whispered to this oblivious feral creature that I loved him, I loved him because it was all I had, even though giving that love felt like I was ripping it from my own chest and leaving a gaping chasm behind. I left him in the care of a farmer who promised to be humane, then fled sobbing into the real estate office down the street where I used to work.

The warm light of the front bathroom reflected in the mirror: I stood at the sink in my bra and disheveled hair, the rest of my clothes balled up beneath the stream of water before me, my breath catching in my throat as I mechanically scrubbed blood stains out of my sweater. Every rational thought in my mind drowned beneath waves of anguish, repeated shouts of why, why, why, why thrown at God like so many shards of colorful glass.

I had to sleep in the chair in my mother’s room that night, haunted by the dial tone of an ended phone call, the sharp smell of octane burning in my nose from the side of the road, the sight of the man flying his sign on the street corner who flinched away from me in fear when I tried to say hello. The darkness seeped in like smoke… suffocating and unending.

Perhaps empathy really is a sin: a destructive pattern of sacrifice and the curse of compassion, tiny droplets in an ocean that could never be enough to make a difference, poured endlessly into a world that I can’t change.

A week later, I was fiddling with the files at work and thinking about my drive to Salt Lake City later that day… about how easy it would be to make a single jerk of the steering wheel toward the interstate guardrail. My rumination was interrupted by my coworker's seven-year-old daughter, who wordlessly set a small bracelet on my desk before skittering away.

It was an elastic band with a ceramic robot charm attached. Without really knowing why, I carried it in my pocket for the rest of the afternoon, then slid it onto my wrist before pulling out onto the highway when I left.

I arrived at my friend's house in Salt Lake without incident, and as I put my things away, I noticed little gestures left around, like earplugs because they knew I lived in the country and wasn't accustomed to city sounds, and an empty cup on the bathroom sink with my nickname from high school on it. I woke up to the smell of chocolate croissants and excited voices proposing all my favorite things for the day's activities, even though I hadn't mentioned wanting to do anything at all... the planetarium, fast food, a Taylor Swift laser show.

The next day, my phone lit up with a text from my brother, brandishing two tickets to the ballet, one for each of us. We had a perfect view from the mezzanine, and amid the dancers' sparkling costumes and graceful antics, wondrous laughter erupted from somewhere deep in my core for the first time in what felt like forever. I left his apartment afterward, the performance program sitting in my passenger seat, and his bedroom window framed his figure as he waved until I was out of the parking lot.

The weekend after that, I arrived at another friend's house to find her fridge stocked with Dr. Pepper. Giving me no time to sit with my thoughts, she dragged me to the local mall and pulled me in for selfies at every mirror she found. She and her husband sat me down on their sectional and practically attacked me with declarations of love, of lifelong friendship and support. We reminisced as the hour grew later and our words started to slur, until all we could really understand was the affection behind them.

And one night, while I was driving home from dance class, a gray and white tabby cat suddenly emerged from the dark and leapt into the road in front of me. I slammed on the brakes – tires screeching as the car skidded diagonally into the bike lane, my bottle of water flying out from my cup holder and splashing all over the dashboard. 

The love I'd tried to send into the world felt far too small. I couldn't fix anything by stacking all the plates together at the end of a meal or saving tulip bulbs to plant in the autumn soil. But as I sat there cutting off a lane of traffic in the street, bracing myself against the steering wheel, I opened my eyes and saw a striped tail disappearing safely into the brush on the other side... and I wondered if maybe I was wrong.

Because it was just a cup in the bathroom, just a wave from the window, just a child-sized bracelet and a can of soda. None of it meant anything in the grand scheme of things. None of it changed the world.

But all of it changed something. And all of those somethings together, for me, changed everything.

Hello, Mckenzie. Management has received your request, and upon careful consideration, we have decided to close the ticket. You are fearfully and wonderfully and nonrefundably made; the difficulty you've been facing with our Compassion software is not a glitch, but rather a simple case of user error.

In order for Compassion to function correctly, it must be run on all devices in the network… including yours. There's nothing wrong with the system I installed. You just have to remember to apply it to yourself, too.

With this in mind, I'd like to schedule a conference for us to go over the proper use of this application to ensure quarterly goals are met effectively. I took the liberty of adding it to your Outlook calendar.  

I'll meet you tomorrow, when the sun rises through the stained glass windows.