Does Empathy Make Me Weak?
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.
Misery – The Secret to Healing
We live in a culture that avoids pain at all costs. We dismiss, downplay, and demonize people who hurt differently than we do.
When we don’t feeeeeel it ourselves, it’s easy to write off other people’s pain:
“They’re lazy.”
“They’re weak.”
“They’re uneducated.”
“They’re illegal.”
“They’re immoral.”
“They deserve it.”
But if we’re unwilling to co-suffer, we will never truly follow Jesus.