Find the good in people. There’s some in everybody. It’s inspiring to behold!
When you allow yourself heart-felt empathy for someone, you’ll see them differently. When you allow your pain to help you connect with another’s person’s pain, it brings healing to you both.
Keeping a tender heart takes much more courage than having a hard heart. The willingness to feel what others feel is called empathy. We need more of that.
It’s easy to hear what we want to hear; hard to hear what an opponent’s really saying. It’s easy to blame and accuse someone; hard to listen to and understand their pain. It’s easy to point out faults in other people; hard to admit your own faults.
A willingness to feel what others are feeling is the first step to understanding them Perhaps, if you don’t care enough to listen to and to try to understand, you don’t really love someone.
A heart as cold as ice, can’t disagree and be nice. Jesus serves healing heart-melts. Judging people by behavior, while ignoring their pain, produces inaccurate assessment.
It’s fine to have some mind-to-mind debate, but heart-to-heart connection ends hate. Thru war and violence, humans have explored our capacity to hate. Now let’s do love. True valor is compassion, not coercion!
It takes courage to feel and express empathy and compassion for others. Self-absorption is full of distortion. Self-focus leads to disappointment; self-forgetfulness, to joy!
Inner nudgings: Temptation nudges us toward evil; the living Jesus, towards good. Instead of calling those who disagree with us “evil,” let’s remove evil from our own heart. Perhaps it’s time for tuition-free classes called: Empathy and Compassion 101.
Christianity without humility is only empty words. (James 4:6.) Jesus: Make my heart a symphony of empathy and a collage of compassion.