compassion on Feelings

“Empathy” literally means “in-feeling”—it is to project myself into another person’s feelings so that I begin to understand what it is like to have his experiences. If I want to gain empathy for a nei...

Best-Selling leadership author Stephen Covey tells the following story about an incident he experienced in the New York subway system, an experience that would radically alter his perception of what i...

I love the following story because it illustrates both our natural defensiveness when we are attacked and the potential for transformation. As the illustration demonstrates, this is only possible when...

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...

The Relapse Brennan Manning’s relapse left him in a literal gutter. The best-selling Christian author and retreat leader had hit bottom  again.  His clothes were in tatters. His face was unshaven and...

Preaching Commentary Approaching a Difficult Text I think it’s good to start with the observation that Matthew 15:21-28 is not an easy or straightforward text. Trying to turn it into an easy text w...

Approaching a Difficult Text I think it’s good to start with the observation that Matthew 15:21-28 is not an easy or straightforward text. Trying to turn it into an easy text will probably leave your...

Jesus, Lord—because you took on flesh, You know what it’s like to be us. You know what keeps us awake at night, or yanks us out of sleep in the early morning. You know what it’s like to have good days...

We must feel toward our people as a father toward his children; yea, the most tender love of a mother must not surpass ours. We must even travail in birth, till Christ be formed in them. They should s...

Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it's uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbin...

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception...

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...

Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself an...

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.

Even for those of us who follow Jesus on a daily basis, the reality is, our sinful nature has infiltrated our minds, and we often find ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously, judging those aro...

Teach me to feel another's woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with...

Imagine making the shape of a valentine heart with your hands and holding it up to your face. That’s the posture of seeing with compassion. You might picture yourself looking through the heart at a pe...

Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling comp...

Compassion costs. It is easy enough to argue, criticize and condemn, but redemption is costly, and comfort draws from the deep. Brains can argue, but It takes heart to comfort.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer."

Lord God, you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and quick to show mercy and faithful love. Your compassion is for all you have made. We admit that this compassion is slow to come to life ...

We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own.

Does the open wound in another's breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own? Or does the blood which is welling from another man's side staunch that which is pouring from our own? D...

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...

Ah, there is nothing more beautiful than the difference between the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a holy being, and the thought about sinful creatures which is natural to a self-r...

[I]f we have compassion without capacity, we have human frustration. If we have capacity without compassion, we have human alienation. If we have compassion and capacity, we have human transformation....

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

Compassion is expressed in gentleness. When I think of persons I know who model for me the depths of spiritual life, I am struck by their gentleness. Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary bat...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...