Tag: empathy

Fighting for Awe and Wonder – And Why It Matters

It was her question that I couldn’t shake. The type of question where harsh reality clashes with idealism. And I couldn’t ignore the drive to chase an answer, even if it took months to unpack. Or in this case, twelve months. 

“How do we maintain awe and wonder?” 

She wasn’t asking because I knew the answer. She’s way smarter than I am. She was asking because she sensed that our souls earnestly wanted to discover some answers together—or at least start trying as we meandered the whimsical neighborhoods of Portland. Her poodle sniffed a statue of Ramona Quimby at the Beverly Cleary Park. 

Speaking of awe and wonder while exploring my favorite childhood author’s hometown and secretly snapping selfies outside her childhood home was the backdrop to her inspired question. Standing where Beverly Cleary would have sipped lemonade and chased playmates in Mary Jane shoes felt surreal. Ramona, Beezus, Henry, Ribsy, and even Scooter, and their white-picket-fence lives were friends who flooded my imagination as a child. I devoured their stories—where the biggest challenge is the neighbor’s complaint of your scruffy dog—over and over by the flicker of a kerosene lantern in a village in Africa. 

The spark of our awe and wonder conversation felt magical, and everything in me was alive. The fact that I was having this exchange with a brilliant children’s book illustrator made it all the more invigorating.

Until I found out the hard truths about Beverly Cleary’s dingy childhood. There wasn’t much sipping of lemonade and chasing of friends along idyllic streets like I’d always imagined. It seems like her writing was less of a memoir and more of an escape to places deeply longed for. 

It hurt to shatter the romantic lens. It was also inspiring. Because there was no better place for me to begin to wrestle with the question of how to maintain awe and wonder in a dark world than outside the childhood home of an author who lived this tension. 

How do I maintain awe and wonder in a world that’s bent on crushing it? 

And why does it matter? In a world where the bodies of children are swept away by swirling waters in Texas, the children in warring strips of lands are paying for centuries of conflict, and the minority children in Cameroon have been prohibited from attending school for fear of their lives, why does it matter to the beating of my very soul if I fight for a sense of awe and wonder? These things feel secondary when I can’t even ensure the protection of the least of these. 

Twelve months later, I still don’t have a clean answer, but I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far and open the conversation to learn from you. I’m pretty sure if you’re reading this, you’ve lived a hard journey across global borders, raised children in hard places, served the unseen, lost a lot, been hurt a lot, wrestled with God a lot, and maybe, just maybe, have lost some awe and wonder in the process. So I think this community has something to teach me.

Why does any of this matter? Why did this question resonate with me and all of humanity?

Because the opposite of awe and wonder is everything that tears us apart from each other and from God. They are the things that disconnect us, suck our souls dry, separate us from empathy for our neighbor, and drive us away from praise. In stark contrast to awe is cynicism, indifference, disenchantment, boredom. On the farthest end of the spectrum of the human experience from wonder is jadedness, apathy, detachment, contempt, and dread. 

A dreary worldview leads us to disconnection, comparison, and inaction. It leads us to seeing others as less than fully human and a growing disdain for the many forms of the goodness of God. We lose our ability to love selflessly and take on pride, gossip, narcissistic tendencies, and even war.

I do not want to be accustomed to these things taking up space in my heart. They are diametrically opposed to awe and wonder. I can hardly think of a closer description of hell. Or things that take my mind further from the heart of God.

Against a landscape of evil, hardness, hyper-self-preservation, disconnection, ingratitude, and danger, I must engage awe and wonder because it leads me to 

praise God better,
which leads me to softness,
which leads me to share,
which leads me to connect,
which leads me to appreciate,
which leads me to protect. 

As a teen full of imagination and wonder, someone informed me that my rose-colored glasses were evidence of a head buried in sand and that my wonder insulted the pain of others. More than anything, I didn’t want to participate in disregarding the pain of others. 

So, instead of learning to better balance the pain of the world with my bursting curiosity, I tried to be mature like them. Bury liveliness. Embrace cynicism. Because jaded people seemed super informed, albeit crippled by inaction. 

As someone who has lived and worked overseas for decades, I’m painfully aware that the pursuit and expression of beauty may be interpreted as disloyalty and abandonment of those in hard seasons. 

But the abandonment of wonder left me hollow. So, I’m back at this question again. 

Practically speaking, how do we do this? For starters, we need to name the things that deoxygenate our awe and loot us of joy. Screens. Inauthentic experiences. Passivity. Pride. Hypervigilant self-focus. Reading comments online—where criticism is acutely trained to detect imperfection and is blind to the bravery it took someone to produce art or work.  

But simply avoiding thieves of joy isn’t what makes us connected and full. Our beings were made to actively seek the beautiful things that make us fully aware of God and in tune with each other. Here are a few fertile places I’ve found.  

  1. Good theology matters. Perhaps there was some level of truth that my childlike awe and wonder neglected to acknowledge the hard things of life, a TCK phenomenon I am only now grasping in my line of work with TCK research. Perhaps a better worldview and a deeper theology would have me explore the complex and uncomfortable truths—learning to hold in tension the beautiful and the hard—and that sometimes the hard is beautiful and the beautiful is hard. Perhaps my heart was meant for deeper worship without reservation when I am called to build a more solid theology of God’s goodness, suffering, sin, and to honor the feeling of paradox of things I don’t fully understand now, but will someday. Perhaps the greatest way to honor the good with awe and wonder is to acknowledge the hard and whisper an invitation for the Holy Spirit to be my teacher (John 14:26).
  2. Cultivate tenderness. Tenderness sees the brokenhearted, turns the throat-lump into sea water running down cheeks, delights in the petal formation of a rose, pauses to ponder the markings of a toad, rebels against the overloaded schedule, believes the best in disquieting misunderstandings, and makes creamy chai for the neighbor. If tenderness is a soft landing place missing from our ability to breathe, stop, praise, notice, engage, maybe it’s time to go back to the root of love—the type that bears, believes, hopes, and endures the things trying to break us (1 Cor. 13:7). 
  3. Throw off the things holding me back. With haste. A good, hard look in the mirror paired with the sacred work of the Holy Spirit burns the secrets holding me back from the Father’s innocence, joy, awe, and empathy. Hebrews 12:1 is a much sweeter bid to freedom than a list of shoulds and condemnation. It is the invitation to drink deep of the things that make me alive and release the things that threaten to sink me. It is a call to marinate in Shalom peace, receive it, root in it, fruit it, and share it. 
  4. Train my eyes upon the unnoticed things. God delights in the song of the sparrow, Leviathan’s froth from playing in the sea, and he even cares about the sorrow of the tax collector. It’s pausing to admire delicate forest fungi while hiking among towering redwoods or listening to the layers of music in a song you’ve heard a hundred times. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The innocent delight in the little things. To be easily awed is an enviable art these days. 

For the past twelve months and twenty-one days, I’ve been sitting on the question I bring to you today: “How do we maintain awe and wonder. And why does it matter?” 

Perhaps the steps of Beverly Cleary’s childhood house was the perfect place to begin wrestling with this question. The gift of her whimsical stories didn’t stem from an idyllic childhood but from a place of longing. Joy and wonder didn’t erase the scarcity but became an intentional step out of the dreariness. 

So what about you? How do you fight for awe and wonder? 

 

Photo by Chris G. Pexels.

In a world gone mad, sympathy is not enough. Here’s something that is…

Cross-cultural workers often have tons of sympathy. We see the needs (physical, spiritual, etc.), we answer the call, and we GO. And that’s just great.

Sometimes we stir up sympathy for the poor and the marginalized; we fund raise with pictures aimed to generate pity and money. And that’s not so great. But it is relatively easy.

Sympathy is a powerful start, but it is not the finish. So I don’t want to talk about sympathy. I don’t want to talk about the pros and cons of feeling (or generating) sympathy. I want to talk about something much more potent.

I want to talk about empathy. I want to talk about the power of empathy in a world gone mad.

 

“Everyone has a story that will break your heart. And, if you’re really paying attention, most people have a story that will bring you to your knees.” ~ Brené Brown

 

Understanding Empathy
“Empathy can be defined as a person’s ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person…. It involves, first, seeing someone else’s situation from his perspective, and, second, sharing his emotions, including, if any, his distress.” ~ Dr. Neel Burton

First, we’ve got to be able to recognize emotions. In fact, the ability to accurately see emotions (ours and others) is a huge part of emotional intelligence. I wrote more about that for the IMB here. Jesus did this splendidly, and it changed peoples’ lives.

Second, we’ve got to be willing to share those emotions, even the not-so-fun kind. This requires a willingness to really walk alongside of, to enter into, to incarnate. We’ve got to be willing to ask the questions “Where have you come from?” and “Where are you going?” while staying in the present with the human in front of us. When we do that, people will feel seen.

But while sympathy and empathy share a lot of letters, they differ greatly: “Sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, or pity for the hardships that another person encounters, while empathy is putting yourself in the shoes of another.”*

We know this is biblical, right? I mean, we know that slapping people with truth is not the Way. We know that just being sorry for people is not the Way. We know that the Word came and dwelt among us, lived and breathed, fought temptation, fought hunger and weariness. He did not just feel sorry for us from on high and give us a handout.

He walked our roads.

I’m not really saying anything new here; I’m just using new words to talk about old things.

 

Consider the Differences
Sympathy demands action, words, movement, gifts. Now! Empathy is healing, even in the silence. Empathy does not freak out when “nothing can be done.”

Sympathy may make me feel better, helping me to feel like a caring and thoughtful person. Empathy, on the other hand, may leave me feeling worse. Because now I FEEL what the other person is feeling.

Sympathy gives stuff to the person and leaves.
Empathy listens to the person and then gives what is necessary, even if that is just time.

Sympathy requires very little heart.
Empathy requires fully engaged hearts.

Sympathy is quick and Instagrammable.
Empathy is slow and rarely easy to communicate to a third party.

Sympathy is one-size-fits-all. A big box store.
Empathy helps us to hear each person’s story, to feel their story, and to respond specifically, lovingly.

Sympathy often produces platitudes, evidence of disconnection.
Empathy happens in proximity and leads to greater connection.

Which one’s easier for you? Which one’s easier for your church or organization?

 

Why Empathy is So Hard
“I cannot empathize with an abstract or detached feeling. To empathize with a particular person, I need to have at least some knowledge of who he is and what he is doing or trying to do. As John Steinbeck wrote, ‘It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.’” ~ Dr. Burton

I often hear people talking with great emotion about “the lost” or “the nations” or UPGs. And that’s fine and good, but I’m afraid that sometimes this generates sympathy for the nameless masses, with zero awareness of the need for empathy. The desire to help, even the desire to see people rescued from hell, can block us from doing the hard work that’s necessary to actually empathize. Sympathizing can be dehumanizing.

So we must recognize what’s going on. Remember, sympathy is not inherently bad. But it’s not inherently enough, either. If it gets us out the door, if it motivates us to offer help, and self, then sympathy can lead to the genesis of empathy.

But sympathy that never outgrows itself risks turning us, our organizations, and our churches into heartless benefactors, with very little Christ-likeness left.

And so we must remember.

We must remember that we follow the King of Empathy, the One who Incarnated. Immanuel.

How unique among the gods!

 

May we remember to imitate our Father, offering our hands and our hearts.

May we remember to walk the dusty roads with our hands out, not just our handouts.

 

May we remember to listen, to hear, and to see humbly,

As we follow our God, The King of Empathy.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

*https://www.dictionary.com/e/empathy-vs-sympathy/

Photo by Alex Geerts on Unsplash

Naming Your Grief—and Finding an Answer

I don’t think I’d ever heard the phrase “disenfranchised grief” before I came back from living overseas. Maybe it was during debriefing that it came up. Or maybe it was later, when I attended a series of grief-support meetings offered by a local hospice. Everyone else in the group had experienced the recent death of a loved one. I came because of the losses I’d had from my return.

Regardless, I didn’t immediately have a label for what I was feeling—sadness that was difficult to accept or express, sadness that easily led to shame and anger. But being able to name it is important. Kenneth Doka, who came up with the term “disenfranchised grief,” and who, in 1989, wrote the book Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, says in an interview with Spring Publishing,

This concept has really resonated with people. And people constantly write and say, “You’ve named my grief. I never really recognized my grief until you talked about it in that way.”

Doka defines disenfranchised grief as “grief that is experienced when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned.” Grief is disenfranchised when losses are not typical to the population at large, so others often discount those losses or don’t understand them. It is difficult to have compassion for people when you don’t recognize why they are sad.

Certainly, cross-cultural workers, with all of their transitions, often deal with this kind of sorrow. And it’s significant enough that an article in Australian Family Physician discusses the response of general practitioners (family physicians) to repatriated cross-cultural workers affected by grief. The part of the article that most helps me understand the concept is the authors’ explanation of six types of disenfranchised grief (drawn from Doka’s work). I’m presenting the list here, but I’ve taken the liberty of adding my own examples (in brackets) of how they might apply to cross-cultural workers:

  • The griever’s relationships are unacknowledged
    [“You can enjoy yourself now that you’re back with your own people.”]
  • Lack of acknowledgment of the griever’s loss
    [“People move all the time. It’s not like somebody died.”]
  • Exclusion of the griever as not being capable of grieving
    [“She’s just a child. She’ll make new friends.”]
  • Exclusion of the griever due to the circumstances of the loss
    [“You knew what you were getting into when you decided to go overseas.”]
  • Exclusion of the griever due to their way of grieving which is not deemed appropriate by the community
    [“The Bible says ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds.'”]
  • Self initiated disenfranchised grief where shame plays a significant role
    [“Why don’t I trust God more?”]

The authors go on to stress how important it is that general practitioners understand disenfranchised grief and take steps to deal with it. Not only may family doctors be asked to treat physical symptoms that are a result of grief, but they may also be the only affordable and “safe” help that is available to the re-entering worker.

I’ve internalized most of the categories above (that’s where the “self initiated” part comes in), especially the second one, “Lack of acknowledgment of the griever’s loss.” When I attended the grief-support meetings, at times I said I was there to observe (which was partly true), and at other times I said I was there to deal with my move back to the States—but that often seemed shallow as I listened to the stories around me. So after a while, I started adding that my father had died a few years earlier, while I was out of the country (and that was true, too). Without mentioning the loss of my father, I could imagine the others saying, “How does leaving a foreign country compare to losing a loved one?” Of course, no one in the group ever said that, but it didn’t stop my imagination.

Instead, that group was one of the places where I’ve found empathy. And for those in the group, empathy was an answer to the grief and an answer to the dangling question marks in our hearts. Outside the group, though, even for those with “acceptable” reasons for sorrow, things were different. Those who are grieving deeply often hear others tell them that their continued sadness is “unhealthy” or “unholy” or that they’ve been sad “too long.” “You need to get on with your life,” their friends might say, along with “We want the old you back” or “Stop being selfish and get over your pity party.”

And then there are the “at leasts” that tell you that things aren’t so bad, because they could be worse. Brené Brown talks about the “at leasts” in a presentation she gave to Great Britain’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. “At leasts” are an enemy of empathy. “Rarely, if ever,” she says, “does an empathic response begin with ‘at least.'”

Below is a short video made from the relevant portion of Brown’s talk. The animation is a nice touch in fleshing out her words. I especially like the image of lowering a ladder down into another person’s darkness. One of the books we have on our bookshelf at home is Bonnie Keen’s A Ladder out of Depression: God’s Healing Grace for the Emotionally Overwhelmed. It is nice to see that ladder not just as a metaphor for recovery, but for empathy, as well.

I do need to say, though, that while Brown does a great job describing empathy, she does so at the expense of sympathy. I really don’t think that empathy is “very different” from sympathy, and I don’t agree that “sympathy drives disconnection.” That sounds to me more like detached pity or a lack of compassion. Brown describes empathy as “feeling with people,” but that would actually be a good description of sympathy. In fact, when the word sympathy came about over 400 years ago, it was from the Greek sin, “together,” plus pathos, “feeling,” . . . in other words, a “feeling together.”

Empathy, on the other hand, is a relatively new term, introduced into the English language by psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909. Titchener got the idea for empathy from einfühlung, a German word crafted 50 years earlier to describe a form of art appreciation based on projecting one’s personality into the art being viewed—thus, “a feeling in.”

One could make the case that inserting our feelings into others’ situations can get in the way of seeing the individualness of their experiences. Sometimes it’s better not to respond with “I know how you feel” but rather with “I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”

As Brown explains, sometimes the best thing to say is very little, something like “I don’t even know what to say right now, I’m just so glad you told me.” Sometimes the best answer is not having all the answers.

If only we could all acknowledge each other’s grief—however we label it. Then we could share openly and honestly. Then we could listen with compassion. Then we could sit down next to someone, with empathy—or sympathy—and “mourn with those who mourn.” Then we could give and receive the community we need.

This post is adapted from two that I wrote earlier for ClearingCustoms.net, here and here, 

(Kenneth Doka, “Disenfranchised Grief,” Living with Grief: Loss in Later Life, Kenneth Doka, ed., Hospice Foundation of America, 2002; Kenneth Doka, “Disenfranchised Grief,” Springer Publishing Company, YouTube, October 4, 2013; Susan Selby, et al, “Disenfranchised Grievers: The GP’s Role in Management,” Australian Family Physician, Vol. 36, No. 9, September 2007)

[photo: “Hiding,” by Kristin Schmit, used under a Creative Commons license]

Small Thoughts: giving some stray ideas a place to land

Sometimes I cough up small thoughts. You know, the one-liners or one-paragraphers that end up floating, never finding a place to lay their pretty little heads?

Well, here are a few small thoughts. Some are text, some are short videos, all are simple. They range from post-fall marriage to emotional nomenclature, from guilting people into evangelism to a lullaby for spiritual warfare. Hopefully, there will be a little something for everyone.

Happy Monday!

Feelings Wheel
Sometimes, like Groot, our vocabulistics are limited. Especially when it comes to emotions. (If that makes no sense, don’t worry about it. But watch out for raccoons.)

In any case, a lot of my clients find this tool extremely helpful in identifying specific emotions and feelings. Start in the center and see if there’s a more accurate word for whatever it is you’re feeling. Note: THIS IS ALSO HELPFUL WITH TEENAGERS. : )

It’s easier to deal with my feelings (or someone else’s feelings) when I identify what it actually is that I’m (they’re) feeling.

With special thanks to Geoffrey Roberts. Visit his site for a printable version.

 

Circles of Intimacy
Regarding boundaries, Jesus, and the dangerous idea that we should all be BFFs. It’s a six-minute video.

These ideas are especially important for missions teams.

 

“New Guilt”
Why do we invite people to Jesus, telling them their guilt and shame will be taken away, and then, when they come to Jesus, immediately burden them with NEW GUILT by telling them that their failure to evangelize will cause the blood of the lost to pour all over their heads? That’s crazy!

There’s got to be a better way to mobilize cross-cultural missions (which is a great idea!) than saying, “Look, your guilt is gone. You’re free! Now here, hold this NEW GUILT while you ponder the eternal destiny of everyone in the world and how it’ll all be your fault if they don’t get to heaven.”

I think Paul’s on to something when he simply answers, “For Christ’s love compels us…”

 

Marriage Post-Fall and Pre-Christ
“You will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.” (Gen 3:16)

Many marriages continue to operate under the curse paradigm, with an ongoing fight for control. The woman yearns for control and maybe freedom, while the man, simply put, rules over her. Societal norms, physical power, and even religious pressure, may be used by the man who seeks to dominate.

But this type of marriage is post-fall and pre-Christ.

When Christ rolls back the curse, this is part of it. And any echoes of control or dominance (by the man or the woman) are echoes of the fall. The curse continues.

But it doesn’t have to.

 

17 years of marriage, and this is all we’ve got
From our house to yours, here are eleven articles about love, marriage, and sex.

 

The two questions that will help people feel loved, heard, and truly seen.
If we can learn to ask these two questions (and deeply care about the answers), we’ll be a step closer to loving people like Jesus loves people. This is a three-minute video.

 

Spiritual Warfare Lullaby
Sometimes I get tired of the fight. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I do, so I wrote this lullaby. Perhaps it’ll remind you of the Truth. And for the record, if someone with more skill would like to appropriate this and improve it, go for it. God bless!

Greater is he who is in me,
Than the one who’s in the world

There is no power in Heav’n or hell or earth
That can ever separate me
From the love of God our Father
From the love of God above

Like a Good Shepherd he leads me
Besides waters still and calm
In the presence of all of my enemies
Still the presence of God above

I will not fear the terror
Of the day or the night
For I know my Father is with me
In the dark he is my Light.

All the hosts of Heaven are shouting
At the victory he’s won
All of Hell continues to tremble
At the love of God above

 

Airplane photo by Tom Rogerson on Unsplash