A Lesson in Empathy for the New Year
As I was leaving church one Sunday morning, a woman approached and asked if I had a moment for her to share a story with me. Before I could answer, she began to relate an incident that happened in her fourth grade class at school a few weeks earlier.
A boy in her class, who had always been well behaved, suddenly started blurting out inappropriate comments and disrupting other students as they worked. She tried talking to the boy but to no avail. To make matters worse, over the course of several days his behavior grew increasingly more erratic.
She finally decided she had no recourse but to take the student to the principal’s office. As she led the sullen fourth grader down the hall, she heard some sniffing and what she thought were sobs. She turned around and noticed the boy, who had been quite angry only moments earlier, was crying. At first, she thought he was only upset because he was afraid of what was going to happen to him, but then she hesitated. Maybe she should try one more time to find out what was troubling her student. She stopped outside the principal’s office and the two sat down on a bench.
She waited for several minutes until the boy regained his composure. “What’s going on?” she quizzed. For a long moment the boy remained silent. Then, slowly, the words began to sputter out. The teacher had to listen carefully as she could barely understand the boy as he struggled to find the right words.
It seems that a week or so earlier the boy had left their backyard gate open and their schnauzer had gotten out. The small dog tried to dash across the street but was hit by a speeding car and killed immediately.
The boy’s mom, looking out from the kitchen window, saw what had happened and ran to the dog and held his limp body close to her and wept. A few minutes later, when she discovered that her son had accidentally left the gate open, she could not contain her emotions. She grabbed him and shouted over and over again, “How could you have been so stupid?”
The teacher listened quietly to her grief-stricken student. She put her arm around him and pulled him next to her. She softly said to him, “Accidents happen. Your mom was just upset. She loves you more than you can possibly know. You’re not stupid. You are a wonderful young man, and I believe in you so very much.”
The teacher held the boy for a long time until his sobbing stopped. Then she went inside the principal’s office and called the boy’s mother and explained to her what had happened. The mom was mortified by her insensitivity and told the teacher she would come to the school right away and try to make things right with her son.
The teacher shared with me that she would continue to check on the boy and his mother to make sure they were working through the difficult situation. I gave the teacher a hug and thanked her for being more than a teacher and for allowing Christ to work through her.
When the teacher stopped me from going to my car after a long Sunday morning, I was a bit irritated. I simply wanted to go home. But after listening to her, I realized her story was a beautiful iteration of God’s story. The teacher’s empathy, kindness, and concern for her student was a modern day reflection of the Gospel story—when we are at our worst, God is at his best showering us with incomprehensible love, acceptance, and forgiveness. And that’s exactly what the teacher did.
The Gospel is “Good News’ in that it reveals God’s love to an underserving creation. The “Good News” is not so much a biblical formula that seeks to make Christian converts; it is an invitation that invites us, regardless of whether we have left the gate open, to allow God to love us, forgive us, and accept us just the way we are. This gift of grace can be experienced wherever and whenever our hearts are receptive to the goodness of God—and it may come to us through a teacher, a neighbor, a parent, a boss, or anyone who follows in the footsteps of Jesus.
When Christians express empathy to the hurting, the down-and-out, the migrant, or anyone who finds himself on the bottom rung of the ladder, the “Good News” of Christmas is proclaimed. To feel the pain and suffering of others identifies us as a child of God.
Contrary to much political rhetoric these days, empathy is not the bane of Western civilization. According to Scripture, it is our greatest virtue. It is a sign that the goodness and grace of God lives in us. Paul’s words that we are to mourn with those who mourn remind us that empathy is a Christian responsibility, without which our lives will be empty of God (Rom. 12:15).
My prayer and hope for the New Year is that God’s people will strive to be empathetic with those who have left the gate open—the homeless, the undocumented foreigner (see Deut. 27:19; Deut. 24:14; Zech. 7:9-10: Mal. 3:5 to learn how God’s people are to treat the undocumented worker), the poor, the sick or anyone on the margins of existence. The love, acceptance, and forgiveness of God know no boundaries.
He that sayeth he abideth in him
ought himself so to walk, even as he walked.
(1 Jn. 2:6 KJV)
