Empathy

There are many messages that I could pull from Elder Neil L. Andersen's talk, Wounded, most of which have been shared before but are well worth repeating. I could talk about how bad things happen to all kinds of people, perhaps especially including good people, as Satan tries to destroy good people and God tries to "prove" them. I could testify that, in spite of the trials we face, we can overcome them (eventually) through the power of Christ's Atonement. I even found this interesting tidbit about how "God did not create our spirits to be independent of Him," which might be worth exploring. But more than any of that, I suppose I want to focus on something that may be only tangentially related to Elder Andersen's talk: Empathy.

As I've heard it described, empathy is different from sympathy in that one who is sympathetic to another's feelings can, perhaps with some accuracy, imagine how the other feels, whereas one with empathy actually knows, through memories of personal experience, how the other person feels. For us, empathy is rare and patchy. There aren't always people who have experienced exactly what we have experienced, and, depending on how precise and picky we want to be, it can be practically impossible to find someone else who has experienced our experiences in the exact same way. We are all different people, and it stands to reason that we probably experience things in different ways. True, perfect empathy between two humans might be impossible.

However, there is always One Person we can turn to for true, perfect empathy: Jesus Christ. As part of His Atonement, He felt exactly the same things we are experiencing. He knows, from personal experience, exactly how we feel. He's been there. So, whenever we feel like we need somebody who knows exactly what we're going through and exactly what it feels like, we can turn to Jesus, as we do or should do with almost everything. Jesus knows everything we have gone through and everything we will go through. He knows our highest highs and our lowest lows. In a metaphysical sense, He has been suffering and celebrating along with us every step of the way. Of course, if all we need is sympathy, we can get that from almost anyone, but if we feel the need for true empathy, we need to turn to Jesus Christ.