Does Empathy Make Me Weak?

Empathy Isn’t Just “Good Vibes”

Never in my life did I think empathy would become conversationally taboo.

But here I am, preparing a keynote for the United Methodist Association of Communicators—a room full of professional storytellers, designers, writers, and church leaders—and I find myself defending empathy as if it were controversial.

The talk is about visual storytelling, but to me, storytelling has always been a function of empathy. It’s how I see. How I listen. How I intuit what matters. It’s my second-highest Strengthsfinder theme, and the lens through which I’ve told stories for over 20 years. Words matter, yes. But words are the overflow of the heart (Luke 6:45). And the heart—what fills it, what shapes it—is often determined by what we see.

As Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body” (Matthew 6:22). What we look at—and how we look at it—determines how we feel, what we say, what we believe. Storytelling, at its best, is a sacred practice of observation. And observing well demands more than technical skill. It requires curiosity. It requires empathy.

Yet in emerging corners of Christianity, empathy has been reframed as a weakness. “Empathy without restraint,” one acquaintance wrote, “is enabling, full-stop. There has to be a ceiling on empathy… a point where good vibes and ‘why can’t we just be kind’ actually make things worse.”

I understand the concern. It pairs nicely if you think empathy is mere sentimentalism. But that isn’t what I mean when I talk about empathy. Empathy, rightly understood, doesn’t enable—it exposes. It opens us up to discomfort, disorientation, and transformation. True empathy doesn’t feel like good vibes. It feels like pain.

It’s easier to dismiss empathy than to practice it. Empathy threatens fixed worldviews. It invites questions where we’ve been trained to recite answers. It asks us to stand under the authority of someone else’s experience—to lower our defenses, suspend our certainty, and submit to the possibility that we might be wrong. That takes courage. And in many ego-protective circles, dogma is hard to compromise.

Disagreement is inevitable. But disagreement without the effort to understand isn’t strength—it’s fear disguised as confidence. To disagree without curiosity is to dig a moat around your worldview and call it conviction. That’s not growth. That’s intellectual paralysis.

Understanding begins with presence. Not presence in theory, or presence on a screen, but actual embodied nearness to another’s lived experience. And that kind of presence will cost you something.

When I was in South Sudan distributing malaria nets, I sat across from a 15-year-old named RK who looked me in the eye and said, “Mosquito nets are great, but they don’t do any good if people don’t care to live.” He spoke of civil war, of alcohol abuse, of collective PTSD, of a culture numbed by violence. His neighbors often sold the nets for liquor. After 60 years of war, the body count was no longer the problem. It was the soul fatigue.

Filming “War on Malaria” in South Sudan

That conversation altered my thinking. We had spent a million dollars on nets. It seemed like the responsible thing to do. It was noble and good and well-intended, but RK’s words reframed everything. Mental health wasn’t on our radar. Trauma-informed infrastructure wasn’t in our budget. His pain became my lens. I couldn’t unhear it. I still pray for him. I still tell his story. Because once you see something clearly, you can’t unsee it.

Empathy is the first step of compassion, and compassion compels action. The Greek word for compassion—splagchnizomai—refers to a gut-deep response that moves you toward change. Jesus didn’t just “feel bad” for people. He moved toward them. He touched lepers. He wept at tombs. He entered the pain. And for that, he was executed.

Empathy got Jesus killed.

It’s tempting to treat scripture as the ultimate authority over lived experience—as though we must choose between the Bible and the world. But this is a false binary. Scripture and experience are not rivals; they are partners in wisdom. The Bible gives us learned wisdom. Culture and community give us observed wisdom. And our own story gives us experienced wisdom. When all three align, we get clarity. When we cut one out, we muddy the big picture.

Empathy sits at the intersection of those three sources. It asks: have I read enough, watched enough, and lived enough to say something meaningful here? If not, then my job is not to speak—it’s to keep learning.

If I have no Black friends, what do I know about being Black in America? If I’ve never left my country, what do I know about refugees? If I’ve never listened, what gives me the right to lead?

We would never attempt calculus without first learning basic algebra. Why would we speak on someone else’s reality without first attempting to understand it?

This is not moral relativism. This is relational maturity. The humility to say “I don’t know” is the beginning of every meaningful truth we ever discover.

Jesus modeled that kind of truth-seeking posture. He stood with the marginalized. He listened to women, ate with outcasts, touched the unclean. His allegiance to the hurting made him a threat to the power structures of his day. Rome didn’t kill him for theology. They killed him for empathy. For alignment with the wrong people. For seeing through their eyes and flipping the world upside down.

If Jesus is our model—and not just our mascot—then we can’t dismiss empathy as a soft skill. It’s a subversive strength. A holy threat to systems of indifference and a courageous approach to embracing our mission more fully.

Philippians 2 paints a picture of Christlike humility: not looking to your own interests, but to the interests of others. That doesn’t mean losing yourself. It means finding yourself in the space between your story and someone else’s.

Empathy isn’t weakness. It’s the beginning of wisdom. That means stepping beyond my own worldview. That means seeking stories I haven’t lived. That means listening before speaking. That means asking better questions. Because the more I learn about people, the more I learn about God. And the more I learn about God, the more I realize how little I know. And for those of us called to tell stories—whether on stage, on screen, or in the everyday poetry of human connection—it’s the only way forward.