A message from Reverend Stacey, BCC Chaplain and Director of Church and Community Engagement.
Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. – Mohsin Hamid
“Empathy will guide our programming and culture at all levels. We recognize that without empathy we cannot understand what type of care and encouragement to provide. A supportive work and program environment means possessing a desire to know and understand others.” (BCC Core Value Statement)
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It refers to the ability to relate to another person’s pain vicariously as if one has experienced that pain themselves. Empathy is different from sympathy because you put yourself in another person’s “shoes.”
Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.
-Daniel H. Pink
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself. -John Steinbeck
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? -Henry David Thoreau
While we are striving to respond with empathy to others around us, we must also be kind to ourselves and feed our own spirits.
I want to interject a bit of humor here with this anonymous quote on empathy: Before you criticize someone … you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
Scriptures in the Judeo-Christian tradition call us to love our neighbors as our selves. In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus taught that our neighbor is anyone in need.
We work together as a BCC team to make a positive impact in our communities on behalf of children, youth and families.
Here is an inspirational word from Christian scriptures: So continue encouraging each other and building each other up, just like you are doing already. -1 Thessalonians 5:11
Our small acts of positive living are making a difference! Always remember, you are not alone.
This was originally part of our 40 Days of Positive Actions activity, sponsored by BCC Spiritual Life Team.