christian living on Empathy

A college professor met his new class on the first day of school. He stood before the students and gave a nice introduction to the class and about himself. Upon completion of his monologue, he looked...

All: Gracious God, we have become callous to those in need, holding back compassion yet unsparing with judgment. We defend our motivations, rather than using all you have given us to love and care for...

Gracious God, you have given us great mercy through Jesus, yet we have withheld mercy from others. Our hearts have been hardened by the world and our sin. Would you soften our hearts? And give us a de...

God of mercy, we ignore the needs of people around us all too often. We get caught up in our own issues and forget that there are millions of people who struggle for basic necessities on a daily basis...

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

I recently had lunch with a former British boarding school chaplain. He remembers being with the boys in his school the morning thirty years ago that the very first pictures of widespread starvation i...

Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful.

For the times when we fail to notice others’ needs, we repent. For our apathy for those you’ve entrusted to us, we repent. For the amount of time we spend focused on ourselves, we repent. For fa...

God's mercy to us is the motivation for showing mercy to others. Remember, you will never be asked to forgive someone else more than God has forgiven you.

It takes a profound conversion to accept that God is relentlessly tender and compassionate toward us just as we are—not in spite of our sins and faults (that would not be total acceptance), but with t...

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don't.

If I withhold mercy, I have lost touch with the gospel. I have lost touch with God’s undeserved kindness and pardon.

Lord, help us to be a people known for the ways in which we live out our faith by loving and serving all people, even those who, in the world’s eyes, have little to offer us. By treating them with dig...

One day, as Leo Tolstoy, the renowned Russian author, was walking down the street when he encountered a man in worn, shabby clothing. The homeless man asked him if he had any money to spare. Tolstoy s...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.

Henri Nouwen is a well-loved writer and theologian who taught for decades at some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, but he left behind the academy to serve among the disabled popula...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

O God, Father of us all, we praise you for so binding humanity together that we must each lean upon the strength and labor of others. We ask your blessing on all men and women who have worked to build...

Almighty God, too often we settle for brokenness in our lives. Rather than offering forgiveness, we hold onto offense. Rather than pursuing justice, we turn away . Rather than offering mercy, we c...

At the 5-mile mark in the Old Kent Riverbank Run a guy passing me said, “Hey buddy, you dropped your key.” There was no getting home without my key. Like a salmon swimming upstream I headed back into ...

In their thoughtful book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share how Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement showed up in the lives of the working poor, which ultimately enable...

Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved.

The most resilient of Christians are, in addition to their church engagement, also active in the world where God has placed them; they deeply concern themselves with poverty; they work to reverse inju...

For the times we neglect to care for our brothers and sisters in Christ, please forgive us, Lord. For the times we fail to welcome new people who look or act different from ourselves, please forgiv...

In Silence, Shusaku Endo writes of the journey of Portuguese Jesuits journeying to Japan. It is a conversation about those who intend to take the path of Jesus, only to find they are on the path of Ju...

Our love to God is measured by our everyday fellowship with others and the love it displays.

To abide in love means to have open eyes, to be able to see something that only a few see, namely, the outstretched, begging hands of the others who are along the way, and now not be able to do anythi...

Angela’s Ashes took the publishing world by storm when it was released in September 1996. It won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Biography/Autobiography. It was also a...