Empathy Equals Experience

To fill you in on one of my prayers, reader, I asked God to make me more empathetic, because pastors cannot remain simply sympathetic. Surprise, surprise! Empathy requires experience, and those experiences are usually painful. God took two men my mother could call "father," and I didn't know either of them very well. These brothers were both my grandfather. Now before you start thinking they/he were/was schizophrenic, let me explain. They shared the same last name, and it seems I spent the most time with both of them in the hospital, where they were simply addressed in that baby-voiced shpeal nurses seem to think the dying need to hear.

"Mr. Oh, we're going to take your blood pressure. Mr. Oh, we're going to give you your pills. Mr. Oh, we're going to sit you up straight."

Dear God, why do they do this? While seeing male nurses (Har har. Calvin jokes that they traded their man card for the hippocratic oath.) really being effective in lifting heavier patients was a boost to my confidence in the necessity of nursing in the following few years of crashing baby-boomers, the condescension in their syrupy voices drained all thoughts of being a physical healer from my mind. I would never be able to degrade human life in my efforts to preserve it, and I would not destroy human dignity to save lives. I can only imagine what they'd think, being treated as infants.

"So what? I wear an adult diaper and need help standing up. Don't you use that tone with me, boy."

But while my biological grandfather did not leave me any legacy, my surrogate drove me to tears. And this is just one instance of empathy! That I would be able to comfort my mother in her grief is growth enough--how much more can I comfort her, now having divorced her husband after being parented by surrogates herself, that I could show her that blood does not necessarily render love, but rather that love entails blood? We have a firm inheritance, protected by the blood that was, the undying love of our Savior, and we have nothing to fear, though family and friends betray us.

My Jesus, as thou wilt! All shall be well for me;
each changing future scene I gladly trust with Thee.
Straight to my home above I travel calmly on,
and sing, in life or death, "My Lord, thy will be done." 


I have heard it taught that the rabbi of Jesus' time would never teach something his disciples could not see, which explains why Jesus would take His disciples on road trips around Israel to exemplify the lessons He was getting across. Case in point: Jesus went to Capernaum (where millstones were crafted), by the edge of the Sea of Galilee to teach that "if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). In instances like these, I realize how much pastors must suffer in order to bear and empathize with the sufferings of the flocks of God's pastures, just as Jesus bears our burdens and knows our frames.