Finding the Lost Art of Empathy: Connecting Human to Human in a Disconnected World - Hardcover
Tracy Wilde, rising celebrity pastor who helped launch the LA Bible Study in Hollywood, reflects on the absence of empathy in today’s world and shares how Christians can renew their compassion to help unify not only the church, but society as well.
In Finding the Lost Art of Empathy, Tracy Wilde addresses the reasons why we struggle with showing empathy toward others and explains why we ultimately avoid it—and even avoid contact with others altogether. She explores the different facets that have promoted isolation instead of community and provides the antidote for a more unified, loving, and empathetic society. In this book Wilde hopes to inspire all of us to self-reflect and remove those obstacles from our lives so that we can experience true fulfillment in our relationships—the way God intended us to.
In Finding the Lost Art of Empathy, Tracy Wilde addresses the reasons why we struggle with showing empathy toward others and explains why we ultimately avoid it—and even avoid contact with others altogether. She explores the different facets that have promoted isolation instead of community and provides the antidote for a more unified, loving, and empathetic society. In this book Wilde hopes to inspire all of us to self-reflect and remove those obstacles from our lives so that we can experience true fulfillment in our relationships—the way God intended us to.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Tracy Wilde is a fifth generation pastor and preacher. Her great-great grandmother Taylor was a circuit preacher. Tracy’s fresh and honest message helps break down walls of insecurity and encourages people to find hope and purpose in Jesus alone. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s of divinity degree in practical theology. Fresh out of college Tracy was offered a job in the Governor’s office of her home state and later moved to Capitol Hill in Washington DC, where she helped lead Bible study groups for congressional leaders, their families, and staff members. After finishing seminary, Tracy moved to Los Angeles, CA, where she helped pioneer and pastor for a Bible-study-turned-church for young Hollywood. Tracy loves wake surfing, paddle boarding, and basically anything else that has to do with warm weather and water.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Finding the Lost Art of Empathy CHAPTER 1
Sympathy versus Empathy
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
I say, “I love you,” to everyone.
I say, “I love you,” to my family. I say, “I love you,” to my friends. I say, “I love you,” to my neighbor Marilee. I say, “I love you,” to people I’ve just met. I say, “I love you,” to my dog. Most important, I say, “I love you,” to baristas because they give me coffee.
I freely say “I love you” because I love people. But it can get weird.
The other day when I was at a meeting, I noticed a man I didn’t recognize wave to me from across the room with a big smile, leading me to believe that I knew him. But I didn’t that I could remember. So as I walked across the room, I dug deep into the recesses of my mind to recall who the guy is and how I know this smiling stranger.
By the time I approach him, I’ve got nothing.
I don’t know if he’s from my church. I don’t know if he works at my dry cleaners. I don’t know if he’s my fifth-grade teacher. All I know is he’s still smiling and seems to know who I am.
So naturally, as that distance between us grows smaller and being a naturally loving person, I go in for the awkward hug. After the uncomfortable embrace, made more uncomfortable by my nerve-induced sweat, he makes a formal introduction, and I realize I didn’t recognize him because I didn’t know him!
Given my propensity for loving people in general, I’ll probably always love and hug friendly strangers. But the reality is that there is a difference between loving a stranger or an acquaintance and showing love toward someone you know.
Think about the starting point of any relationship. It can start off really awkward, but then you get to know the person—you know their favorite food, how many siblings they have, where they’re from, whether they are an INTJ or an ENFP (by the way, I’m an ESFJ). Obviously the level of your love for someone will develop and grow deeper the more you get to know that person. My love for the smiling stranger came from my overall love for people—for God’s children. But my sister? Of course, my love for her runs far deeper.
There is a similar difference between sympathy and empathy.
When you sympathize with someone, you go online or to a store and peruse the sympathy cards. You usually find an array of visuals ranging from elegant-looking lilies to mopey-eyed puppies. You grab one, write “With love” and sign your name, seal and stamp it, and stick it in the mailbox.
Easy enough.
But when you show empathy, you step into a much deeper level of another person’s pain. You jump in the pit and get your hands dirty. This can be done in a number of ways, and there are no limits. You can go to the hospital and sit with someone who is waiting to receive the good or bad news. You listen and attempt to understand the breadth of the situation, no matter how troubling or difficult. You’re physically and emotionally available for whatever the need is at the time.
It’s not so easy.
And it’s where so many of us walk on by.
· · ·
In my research to understand the difference between sympathy and empathy, I went back to the root of each word. For instance, sympathy comes from the Greek origin sun, meaning with, plus pathos, meaning feeling. So sympathy means with feeling.
On the flip side, empathy is em, meaning in, plus pathos, meaning feeling. In feeling. In the situation. In the valley with another hurting soul.
In a nutshell, sympathy skims the surface. That’s not a bad thing; it’s appropriate to show sympathy some of the time. But empathy goes deeper: it includes action. The key difference between the two is that the former can be shown without full understanding or connection.
Sympathy feels a lot like signing a card with love or giving a sweaty hug to a stranger.
Empathy is a whole lot more. It feels like being in feeling.
It feels (kind of) like being in love.
Walk a Mile
Please bear with me a moment while I attempt to get a little scientific on you. Keep in mind that I am by no means an expert (my only C in college was in biology), but I am an answer-seeking and research-collecting kind of woman, and I will indulge here.
Recent work in neuroscience has unlocked tremendous findings about empathy and the human brain. In one of philosophy’s most famous and long-standing texts, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote that we humans are wired as self-interested creatures who seek only our own individual desires and needs. This philosophy of self-interest has certainly dominated our Western thinking. However, there is proof that we are also wired for empathy.
The discovery came from a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, Italy, in 1990. Italian researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team (Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi) conducted experiments on monkeys with an implanted electrode in their brains. While observing the monkeys, the researchers discovered that a certain part of the monkey’s brain, the premotor cortex, was activated when the monkey picked up an object. Later, they discovered quite inadvertently that the same part of the monkey’s brain was activated and lit up when the monkey saw one of the researchers picking up that same object. Roman Krznaric, a social philosopher and leading voice on empathy, notes in his book Empathy Why It Matters, and How to Get It that this finding was later confirmed through more experiments with monkeys and humans by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).I We’ve all experienced this phenomenon when we see someone stub his or her toe and we wince in pain as if we too had stubbed our toe.
Krznaric explains this groundbreaking evidence:
They had accidentally discovered “mirror neurons.” These are neurons that fire up both when we experience something (such as pain) and also when we see somebody else going through the same experience. People with lots of mirror cells tend to be more empathetic, especially in terms of sharing emotions. According to Rizzolatti, “mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct stimulation.” Eminent neuroscientist Vilanyanur Ramachandran has compared the discovery of mirror neurons to Crick and Watson’s double-helix revelation: “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.”II
If nothing else, this discovery of mirror neurons finally helps me solve the mystery as to why I yawn every time I see another person yawn: it is because of my empathetic brain! So we are actually wired for empathy. Great news! But if we are wired for it, then why don’t we respond to our empathetic impulses? Well, mirror neurons are only part of the story.
We might be wired for empathy, but our brains aren’t always activated for it.
Jeremy Rifkin, an American social theorist, shows in his book The Empathetic Civilization that although we have the ability for emotional empathy, which is fired by our mirror neurons, there is another side to our empathetic brain, which is our cognitive empathy. This is the aspect of empathy that helps us to understand not just the feelings of others but their thoughts as well. Cognitive empathy is putting yourself in someone’s else place or perspective.
Rifkin argues that when this cognitive part of empathy is practiced,
one develops a moral sensitivity to the extent one is embedded, from infancy, in a nurturing parental, familial, and neighborhood environment. Society can foster that environment by providing the appropriate social and public context. While primitive empathic potential is wired into the brain chemistry of some mammals, and especially the primates, its mature expression in humans requires learning and practice and a conducive environment.III
In other words, we can train ourselves to be more empathetic by putting ourselves in an emotionally neutral state and then letting our neutral emotions enter into another person’s pain and think from his or her perspective. Strictly speaking, we can become more empathetic by training ourselves to think about a situation from our own point of view and from someone else’s. The problem is that we often struggle to make this brain connection due to the fact that we rely on our own thoughts and feelings as a reference for viewing others rather than a neutral state. I call this the Thomas Hobbes effect. Simply put, we don’t know how to put ourselves in another person’s world. We rely on our own feelings, self-interests, and experiences to be our gauge for empathy. For example, if you have spent the holidays with your entire extended family, you have a pretty good gauge on your empathy scale when you take a look at blending family traditions. As we get older and start our own families, we also begin new traditions and preferences, and they often look drastically different from those of our other family members. Instead of recognizing how foolish it is to be obsessed with our self-interest and traditions, we often explode with anger and frustration at our loved ones because one person wants to open presents Christmas Eve while the other person wants to open them Christmas morning.
Sound ridiculous?
Lack of empathy often is.
Our brain wants to work to adjust and correct our self-centered tendencies, but we have to practice thinking from a perspective different from our own.
Neuroscientists believe our brains are extremely malleable. A significant amount of research concludes that the ability to show empathy can improve greatly with practice. If this is true, then this is great news for all of us! We don’t have to have shared experiences (or been through what others have been through) in order to empathize with another person; we just need to practice placing ourselves in another person’s world.IV
You no doubt know the often-heard adage that says, “You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” I think a better approach to empathy is to put ourselves in another person’s world. When you place yourself in another person’s world, you see and experience his perspective from his point of view (i.e., cultural context and historiocity as well as linguistic nuances). When we do this, we can better experience the scope of his feelings and life. By putting ourselves in the midst of his world, consistent and intentional empathy can become habitual and second nature to us.
Aristotle was right: “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Practice makes perfect. Training ourselves to think and feel what another person might be experiencing is possible. In fact, it is the best way to be human. The more we do something, the more it becomes who we are. The exciting part of this concept is that it applies to everyone. None of us are too far from loving our neighbor and living an altruistic life. None of us are too far from putting ourselves in another person’s world. All of us are on the journey together, learning to be present and to listen.
We practice ways to succeed in our careers, education, or finances. We measure our success by who we know, what kind of car we drive, and the price tag on our clothes. We rarely think of empathy as a measure of success. I think the most successful people in the world are the ones who can recognize a need and activate empathy in the midst of our growing self-obsessed world.
So, good news! Getting an A in empathy is way more important than getting a C in biology (at least that’s what I tell myself).
Active Listening
Recently I was at church listening to a message by a preacher who was giving a practical and personal illustration to the scripture he was highlighting. I had stayed up a little too late the night before and hadn’t yet had enough coffee to fully engage like I usually do, but I laughed when everyone else laughed, said “amen” when others around me shared the sentiment, and even wrote notes (well, doodled on my notepad).
Out of the blue, the preacher must have said something quite funny because the congregation roared in laughter. Naturally I joined in and even added a hand-to-knee slap. My friend sitting next to me said, “What did he say? I missed it.” Busted! I had no idea what the preacher said because I clearly wasn’t listening and neither was my friend. So while everyone was connected to the preacher and his illustration, my friend and I were completely out of the loop.
I was immediately convicted when I thought back on my seminary years when I had studied the concept of active listening. Active listening is not easy. Essentially it is the ability to be totally present in the moment. It requires our full attention and the ability to shut our brain off and stop thinking about anything except for what another person is saying. That’s hard. The entire point of active listening is to listen to gain understanding. It requires that the listener ask questions in the quest to comprehend. The listener will seek to confirm she is on the right track by responding, “This is what I hear you saying.” It’s to help verify that the listener truly is on the path to understanding.
However, most of the time when we’re listening to someone, our brains are working hard to process the next thing we’re going to say. We tend to listen to respond, not to understand. How many conversations have you had where someone was pouring out her heart to you, and you were thinking and formulating what you were going to say the moment there was a break in her speech? We do this all the time! But you can’t effectively listen to someone if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say when she finally stops talking. How many times have you looked down at your phone because you felt uncomfortable with the person or crowd you were with, or because you felt the awkwardness that comes with being alone? Or what about when sitting at stoplights? Or at dinner parties (when you should be engaging in the conversation)? Sitting in a coffee shop? We all do it.
But what if we were more intentional?
What if we were more willing to engage?
What if we sought strangers out for conversation?
Jesus illustrates this for us in John 4 when he engages in conversation with a woman at a well. It was a dialogue with a Samaritan woman—one who, culturally and historically, had no voice or status in society. He positioned himself to have a conversation with someone no one else would have dared talk to. It was the sixth hour of the day, which was considered a very unusual time to come to a well in ancient times. This indicated that those who came at that hour didn’t want to be seen or talk to others. And yet Jesus sat down by the well and waited. When the woman approached, he asked for a drink in order to start a conversation. This wasn’t a chance encounter: Jesus had placed himself there. He knew she was struggling and searching for love in all the wrong places. She had been married four times and was now sleeping with a man who wasn’t her husband. But instead of avoiding the topic and a potentially compromising situation—a man couldn’t be seen talking to a woman alone—Jesus stayed and conversed. He acknowledged her circumstances without judgment and gave her hope for a new and different kind of life.
Jesus models for us something the rest of us struggle to exercise. He didn’t try to a...
Sympathy versus Empathy
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
I say, “I love you,” to everyone.
I say, “I love you,” to my family. I say, “I love you,” to my friends. I say, “I love you,” to my neighbor Marilee. I say, “I love you,” to people I’ve just met. I say, “I love you,” to my dog. Most important, I say, “I love you,” to baristas because they give me coffee.
I freely say “I love you” because I love people. But it can get weird.
The other day when I was at a meeting, I noticed a man I didn’t recognize wave to me from across the room with a big smile, leading me to believe that I knew him. But I didn’t that I could remember. So as I walked across the room, I dug deep into the recesses of my mind to recall who the guy is and how I know this smiling stranger.
By the time I approach him, I’ve got nothing.
I don’t know if he’s from my church. I don’t know if he works at my dry cleaners. I don’t know if he’s my fifth-grade teacher. All I know is he’s still smiling and seems to know who I am.
So naturally, as that distance between us grows smaller and being a naturally loving person, I go in for the awkward hug. After the uncomfortable embrace, made more uncomfortable by my nerve-induced sweat, he makes a formal introduction, and I realize I didn’t recognize him because I didn’t know him!
Given my propensity for loving people in general, I’ll probably always love and hug friendly strangers. But the reality is that there is a difference between loving a stranger or an acquaintance and showing love toward someone you know.
Think about the starting point of any relationship. It can start off really awkward, but then you get to know the person—you know their favorite food, how many siblings they have, where they’re from, whether they are an INTJ or an ENFP (by the way, I’m an ESFJ). Obviously the level of your love for someone will develop and grow deeper the more you get to know that person. My love for the smiling stranger came from my overall love for people—for God’s children. But my sister? Of course, my love for her runs far deeper.
There is a similar difference between sympathy and empathy.
When you sympathize with someone, you go online or to a store and peruse the sympathy cards. You usually find an array of visuals ranging from elegant-looking lilies to mopey-eyed puppies. You grab one, write “With love” and sign your name, seal and stamp it, and stick it in the mailbox.
Easy enough.
But when you show empathy, you step into a much deeper level of another person’s pain. You jump in the pit and get your hands dirty. This can be done in a number of ways, and there are no limits. You can go to the hospital and sit with someone who is waiting to receive the good or bad news. You listen and attempt to understand the breadth of the situation, no matter how troubling or difficult. You’re physically and emotionally available for whatever the need is at the time.
It’s not so easy.
And it’s where so many of us walk on by.
· · ·
In my research to understand the difference between sympathy and empathy, I went back to the root of each word. For instance, sympathy comes from the Greek origin sun, meaning with, plus pathos, meaning feeling. So sympathy means with feeling.
On the flip side, empathy is em, meaning in, plus pathos, meaning feeling. In feeling. In the situation. In the valley with another hurting soul.
In a nutshell, sympathy skims the surface. That’s not a bad thing; it’s appropriate to show sympathy some of the time. But empathy goes deeper: it includes action. The key difference between the two is that the former can be shown without full understanding or connection.
Sympathy feels a lot like signing a card with love or giving a sweaty hug to a stranger.
Empathy is a whole lot more. It feels like being in feeling.
It feels (kind of) like being in love.
Walk a Mile
Please bear with me a moment while I attempt to get a little scientific on you. Keep in mind that I am by no means an expert (my only C in college was in biology), but I am an answer-seeking and research-collecting kind of woman, and I will indulge here.
Recent work in neuroscience has unlocked tremendous findings about empathy and the human brain. In one of philosophy’s most famous and long-standing texts, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote that we humans are wired as self-interested creatures who seek only our own individual desires and needs. This philosophy of self-interest has certainly dominated our Western thinking. However, there is proof that we are also wired for empathy.
The discovery came from a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, Italy, in 1990. Italian researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team (Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi) conducted experiments on monkeys with an implanted electrode in their brains. While observing the monkeys, the researchers discovered that a certain part of the monkey’s brain, the premotor cortex, was activated when the monkey picked up an object. Later, they discovered quite inadvertently that the same part of the monkey’s brain was activated and lit up when the monkey saw one of the researchers picking up that same object. Roman Krznaric, a social philosopher and leading voice on empathy, notes in his book Empathy Why It Matters, and How to Get It that this finding was later confirmed through more experiments with monkeys and humans by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).I We’ve all experienced this phenomenon when we see someone stub his or her toe and we wince in pain as if we too had stubbed our toe.
Krznaric explains this groundbreaking evidence:
They had accidentally discovered “mirror neurons.” These are neurons that fire up both when we experience something (such as pain) and also when we see somebody else going through the same experience. People with lots of mirror cells tend to be more empathetic, especially in terms of sharing emotions. According to Rizzolatti, “mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct stimulation.” Eminent neuroscientist Vilanyanur Ramachandran has compared the discovery of mirror neurons to Crick and Watson’s double-helix revelation: “I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.”II
If nothing else, this discovery of mirror neurons finally helps me solve the mystery as to why I yawn every time I see another person yawn: it is because of my empathetic brain! So we are actually wired for empathy. Great news! But if we are wired for it, then why don’t we respond to our empathetic impulses? Well, mirror neurons are only part of the story.
We might be wired for empathy, but our brains aren’t always activated for it.
Jeremy Rifkin, an American social theorist, shows in his book The Empathetic Civilization that although we have the ability for emotional empathy, which is fired by our mirror neurons, there is another side to our empathetic brain, which is our cognitive empathy. This is the aspect of empathy that helps us to understand not just the feelings of others but their thoughts as well. Cognitive empathy is putting yourself in someone’s else place or perspective.
Rifkin argues that when this cognitive part of empathy is practiced,
one develops a moral sensitivity to the extent one is embedded, from infancy, in a nurturing parental, familial, and neighborhood environment. Society can foster that environment by providing the appropriate social and public context. While primitive empathic potential is wired into the brain chemistry of some mammals, and especially the primates, its mature expression in humans requires learning and practice and a conducive environment.III
In other words, we can train ourselves to be more empathetic by putting ourselves in an emotionally neutral state and then letting our neutral emotions enter into another person’s pain and think from his or her perspective. Strictly speaking, we can become more empathetic by training ourselves to think about a situation from our own point of view and from someone else’s. The problem is that we often struggle to make this brain connection due to the fact that we rely on our own thoughts and feelings as a reference for viewing others rather than a neutral state. I call this the Thomas Hobbes effect. Simply put, we don’t know how to put ourselves in another person’s world. We rely on our own feelings, self-interests, and experiences to be our gauge for empathy. For example, if you have spent the holidays with your entire extended family, you have a pretty good gauge on your empathy scale when you take a look at blending family traditions. As we get older and start our own families, we also begin new traditions and preferences, and they often look drastically different from those of our other family members. Instead of recognizing how foolish it is to be obsessed with our self-interest and traditions, we often explode with anger and frustration at our loved ones because one person wants to open presents Christmas Eve while the other person wants to open them Christmas morning.
Sound ridiculous?
Lack of empathy often is.
Our brain wants to work to adjust and correct our self-centered tendencies, but we have to practice thinking from a perspective different from our own.
Neuroscientists believe our brains are extremely malleable. A significant amount of research concludes that the ability to show empathy can improve greatly with practice. If this is true, then this is great news for all of us! We don’t have to have shared experiences (or been through what others have been through) in order to empathize with another person; we just need to practice placing ourselves in another person’s world.IV
You no doubt know the often-heard adage that says, “You can’t really understand another person’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” I think a better approach to empathy is to put ourselves in another person’s world. When you place yourself in another person’s world, you see and experience his perspective from his point of view (i.e., cultural context and historiocity as well as linguistic nuances). When we do this, we can better experience the scope of his feelings and life. By putting ourselves in the midst of his world, consistent and intentional empathy can become habitual and second nature to us.
Aristotle was right: “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Practice makes perfect. Training ourselves to think and feel what another person might be experiencing is possible. In fact, it is the best way to be human. The more we do something, the more it becomes who we are. The exciting part of this concept is that it applies to everyone. None of us are too far from loving our neighbor and living an altruistic life. None of us are too far from putting ourselves in another person’s world. All of us are on the journey together, learning to be present and to listen.
We practice ways to succeed in our careers, education, or finances. We measure our success by who we know, what kind of car we drive, and the price tag on our clothes. We rarely think of empathy as a measure of success. I think the most successful people in the world are the ones who can recognize a need and activate empathy in the midst of our growing self-obsessed world.
So, good news! Getting an A in empathy is way more important than getting a C in biology (at least that’s what I tell myself).
Active Listening
Recently I was at church listening to a message by a preacher who was giving a practical and personal illustration to the scripture he was highlighting. I had stayed up a little too late the night before and hadn’t yet had enough coffee to fully engage like I usually do, but I laughed when everyone else laughed, said “amen” when others around me shared the sentiment, and even wrote notes (well, doodled on my notepad).
Out of the blue, the preacher must have said something quite funny because the congregation roared in laughter. Naturally I joined in and even added a hand-to-knee slap. My friend sitting next to me said, “What did he say? I missed it.” Busted! I had no idea what the preacher said because I clearly wasn’t listening and neither was my friend. So while everyone was connected to the preacher and his illustration, my friend and I were completely out of the loop.
I was immediately convicted when I thought back on my seminary years when I had studied the concept of active listening. Active listening is not easy. Essentially it is the ability to be totally present in the moment. It requires our full attention and the ability to shut our brain off and stop thinking about anything except for what another person is saying. That’s hard. The entire point of active listening is to listen to gain understanding. It requires that the listener ask questions in the quest to comprehend. The listener will seek to confirm she is on the right track by responding, “This is what I hear you saying.” It’s to help verify that the listener truly is on the path to understanding.
However, most of the time when we’re listening to someone, our brains are working hard to process the next thing we’re going to say. We tend to listen to respond, not to understand. How many conversations have you had where someone was pouring out her heart to you, and you were thinking and formulating what you were going to say the moment there was a break in her speech? We do this all the time! But you can’t effectively listen to someone if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say when she finally stops talking. How many times have you looked down at your phone because you felt uncomfortable with the person or crowd you were with, or because you felt the awkwardness that comes with being alone? Or what about when sitting at stoplights? Or at dinner parties (when you should be engaging in the conversation)? Sitting in a coffee shop? We all do it.
But what if we were more intentional?
What if we were more willing to engage?
What if we sought strangers out for conversation?
Jesus illustrates this for us in John 4 when he engages in conversation with a woman at a well. It was a dialogue with a Samaritan woman—one who, culturally and historically, had no voice or status in society. He positioned himself to have a conversation with someone no one else would have dared talk to. It was the sixth hour of the day, which was considered a very unusual time to come to a well in ancient times. This indicated that those who came at that hour didn’t want to be seen or talk to others. And yet Jesus sat down by the well and waited. When the woman approached, he asked for a drink in order to start a conversation. This wasn’t a chance encounter: Jesus had placed himself there. He knew she was struggling and searching for love in all the wrong places. She had been married four times and was now sleeping with a man who wasn’t her husband. But instead of avoiding the topic and a potentially compromising situation—a man couldn’t be seen talking to a woman alone—Jesus stayed and conversed. He acknowledged her circumstances without judgment and gave her hope for a new and different kind of life.
Jesus models for us something the rest of us struggle to exercise. He didn’t try to a...
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