How precious is empathy?
We can feel the pain of others by watching them go
through something difficult, but how much more we are connected to a person when his or her pain is something through which we ourselves have arduously sojourned.
We live our lives experiencing hurt. On one hand, God uses it for our
sanctification. To use the opportunity
to rise above and keep focused on Him through the pain. On the other, which ebbs on the "love
your neighbor" side of the spectrum, the deep pangs of hurt that
reverberate through the walls of minds and hearts echo in the hearts of the
specific people God brings into our lives at specific times.
God grows empathy in us in the most miserable and glorious ways. What we’ve specifically experienced… The abuse…
Your father walking out on your family... Your mother being an alcoholic... Your brother committing suicide... The cousin who was shot… Your friend dying of Cancer... When you had the miscarriage? Or the abortion? Or your childhood bullying? The illness you have... Are these happenings solely purposed for you
and you alone to bear, to conceal, to overcome without being used?
All of the hardships that we face connect us to each
other. No one person is going through
any one thing alone. Every single one of
us is going through something that another has gone through, and it is up to
those who have made it through with the love and grace of God to pour into
those that we meet that stir up in us a place of remembrance.
Each hurtful, broken situation is a hand to be stretched
out to another. Don't keep it to
yourself. Stretch it out and reach for
the hurting.
Happiness breeds love as well. Joy is contagious, amorously building
relationships. But the knitting of bonds
brought together by pain and its redemption, it's like setting an anchor in wet
cement, a permanent connection of understanding, being understood, and with
that, being loved through it.
Yes, Jesus experienced everything we could possibly
imagine. There’s the vertical love. But when there is someone sitting in front of
you that knows deeply and intimately the specific pain through which you are going,
that in its own right is the light and love of God shining down upon His
children.
Loneliness.
Loss. Illness. As His beloved children, our horizontal
responsibility to each other is to love one another. Our greatest pains, our most hurtful
heartaches are not lost...they are not meaningless, but so meaningful that God
trusts us enough with the hurt so that we may be a light to those whose eyes
can't seem to find Him in the dark.
Every day God gives us tools. Use them in love. Pray to Him through them, these aching
situations. Then when you make it through, because you will, when God gives you
that opportunity to share, to console, to teach—take it. Empathy empowers us to move. Pain can bring glory to God. That sounds like a terrible, unloving
equation. But what if this is just what
it takes to cause us to pause and reach out to those hurting—not just to simply wave as we
pass by, but to stop, reach out, hold onto, and pull through?
Empathy. The price
tag is large. But the gift is great.
