If all was known, all would be forgiven.*
My husband often gets frustrated at me for "not taking his side" when he is venting about a rude customer or a bad driver.
"Maybe that customer's mom just died, and she's trying to rent a car to get to the funeral, and she had a strained relationship with her, and never got closure, and that's why she was rude to you."
"Maybe that driver has kids bickering in the backseat and is late for an appointment to the doctor to find out what's wrong with her 5-year-old that has been worrying her, and maybe they distracted her, and that's why she cut you off without signaling."
I have tried over our 6 years of marriage to less often "play the devil's advocate." (For the sake of my marriage, self-control to not say everything that comes to mind is a necessity.) But somehow, it is engrained in me to step into the shoes of the other. Somewhere along my impactful college years, I started trying to see things from others' points of view—and I couldn't stop.
And I hope I never do.
Jesus instructed us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44-45) and used a parable (The Unforgiving Servant, Matthew 18:21-35) to demonstrate the importance of forgiving others' lesser grievances against us in light of our own glaring sin, of which God has forgiven us in Christ.
One helpful tool in obeying Jesus' commands is empathy. The Merriam-Webster describes empathy as:
the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another
To expound on the opening quote, this idea is that if we knew all of someone's circumstances and could really understand how they saw things, we would give them grace rather than contempt.
Here's another illustration that has stuck with me, though I cannot recall its origin.
A professor calls two students to the front of his classroom, asking each to stand on different sides of him. He produces an apple and places it on the desk between them.
"What color is the apple?" he asks.
The young man on the left says, "Black," just as the young woman on the right says, "Red." They are both very certain of their assertions.
"How can you say that? It is clearly painted black."
"Are you blind? It's red, like apples always are!"
Finally, the professor asks the students to switch places.
As the two walk round the desk, the understanding registers on their faces. This is what the apple looks like.
In this scenario, there were very clearly two true answers to the question, "What color is the apple?" Both responses seemed to be incongruent until they realized that the apple was indeed both black and red.
The point is that there are always at least two perspectives to everything (and often, more than two). I invite you to join me in developing and reinforcing the trait of empathy that equips us to love as Jesus calls us to, as I begin this "Exercises in Empathy" blog post series, sharing experiences that demonstrate the understanding and grace that can occur when the bigger picture is acknowledged.
May we never stop stepping into another's shoes.
*If only I could recall who first spoke these impactful words to me. I'm thinking it must have been during my time studying Conflict and Reconciliation at Westmont College. If so, I thank Dr. Deborah Dunn for this life-changing quote.
Featured Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.
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