There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.
George Elliot
When we put ourselves in the other person’s place, we’re less likely to want to put him in his place.
Farmer’s Digest
The tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz provides a good reminder for ministers. At one point in that beloved old film, he says that in the past he’s had both a brain and a heart, and having had both he prefers having a heart if he can have only one of the two.
If I had to choose which is the more important attribute for pastors, a heart (for people) or a brain (intellectual ability), based on my experience I’d also opt for the heart. For theologians and other scholars, that may not be the case, but for those who are in the people ministry, who do the day-to-day work of touching human need, the heart is essential.
Most pastors do a lot of counseling, whether in formal sessions or informal conversations, and a certain degree of empathy with the hurting person is essential. To help people, we need to care for them, and we’ve got to communicate that concern. In other words, a pastor needs a pastor’s heart.
Some pastors will naturally have more empathy than others because of personality differences. Those with the greater empathy will experience more pain as they feel more of a hurting person’s suffering, but they may be more effective counselors, too. So in that sense, feeling some pain as you hear people describing their woes is a good sign.
A problem arises, however, when you get so emotionally involved in the other person’s woes that you lose perspective. Then there are two suffering people. You’re no longer able to help as much as you might otherwise. You can end up feeling like the pastor who said, “By the time I have begun to understand their story, what they believe is the problem, I am emotionally involved and often unable to retain objectivity. I almost fear counseling in severe crises.”
Thus, as impersonal as it sounds, while you need empathy as a pastor, you also need to maintain a healthy measure of detachment.
Keeping Perspective
How do we empathize in a helpful way without losing the objectivity needed both by us and by those with whom we’re counseling? As a pastor and youth worker, I’ve had to find the balance. Here’s what I’ve found.
For one thing, I try to keep in mind, as humbling as it is, that there are some people I simply can’t help. Their problems are simply beyond my capabilities. I will inevitably encounter problems I can’t resolve. Admitting this hard truth keeps me from beating my head against the wall when, in fact, I can’t do anything about the problem.
Some of us have a tendency to keep a mental scorecard, to keep track of what percentage of counselees we’re able to help. In most cases, however, we tend to dwell on the frustrating cases. Such an attitude is only setting ourselves up for disappointment and sleepless nights.
I’ve recently had a correspondence relationship with a woman whose husband is in prison, which creates obvious hardships of many kinds. She has several children, and there’s been sickness in the family. She herself has had serious health problems. These are all very real, very painful things that I can’t begin to “solve” for her in any tangible way.
That’s not to say, of course, that I can’t minister to her. I listen to her, give her someone to talk to. I let her know I care, and I encourage her to hang in there. That gives her some comfort. But whatever help our correspondence provides, it does not alter in the least her difficult circumstances. And that’s just the way life is.
Now, lest you read hopeless resignation into my attitude, let me assure you that’s not the case. In fact, as pastors it’s vital that we have this realistic perspective on life if we’re going to meet the toughest needs. We have to accept what we can’t do, so that rather than being discouraged by that, we can focus our attention on the things we can do.
I remember a time during my years as a pastor when a doctor friend took me into a hospital room to visit one of his cancer patients. The patient was a woman twenty years older than my friend, and he had grown to love her almost as his mother. He had also become angry with other preachers who had come into the woman’s room and prayed with her, telling her God would heal her if she had enough faith, but then abandoned her as she continued to get worse.
As we were about to go into her room, he said to me, “Please don’t come in if you’re not willing to hang in with her until she dies. I’d like you to keep coming back with me, because I’d like her to know there’s a preacher who will see it all the way through. We doctors have to see it all the way through no matter what. But you preachers tend to be so fickle.”
He had encountered pastors who liked to keep score, who wanted to be able to solve every problem, who wanted to avoid the disappointment of unanswered prayer. That experience impressed on me the importance of being willing to stick with a person through the whole experience in the real pain of life. And while I never did develop the same depth of love for the woman that my friend had, I did stay with them to the end.
Given the incarnational principle we discussed in the last chapter, I’m convinced that part of our ministry of comfort is simply being there in the darkest hours. As Philip Yancey once wrote, “Our job, and I say this carefully, is to show we care even when God seems not to.” Part of God’s plan is that his love is communicated by people. It’s not always a vision or a still, small voice. Often it’s a pastor or friend who is incarnating God’s love. God is not absent. He has simply chosen to extend his love through us.
A second helpful perspective is that even when a problem isn’t so insoluble as terminal cancer or a husband in prison, we don’t always have to be the ones to supply the perfect answer. We don’t have to play Savior, even though our ego may be tempted to try.
This is not to say that we should never provide a directive answer. But many times we just don’t need to. Frequently when people come for counseling, they don’t need a solution. They may simply need reassurance that they’re doing the best they can. Or that the solution they’ve thought of is a good one. Or maybe they merely need to be told that they’re not alone, that fine Christians have gone through this struggle before, that God still loves and accepts them.
Other times, people paint themselves into corners, thinking there’s no way out of whatever difficulty they face. Here again, we don’t have to provide the answer. We may just need to say that there’s always more than one way to deal with things, to help sort out options and help the person not to feel trapped. From our more objective viewpoint, we can perhaps suggest a couple of fresh courses of action to consider.
A third approach I’ve found helpful is that when a problem seems especially big, I’ll deliberately and verbally delegate the solution to the Lord in prayer. I let the person know that I don’t have the perfect answer, but that we can take the matter to the One who does. At times, I’ve deliberately stopped in the middle of a session to say to God that this is bigger than us and we’re turning it over to him.
I do a similar thing now that I’m president of Taylor University, a role which at times seems to throw overwhelming demands at me. It’s sort of a periodic ritual: I’ll get in my car and drive around the perimeter of the campus, and as I drive I once again commit the whole thing to the Lord — the school as a whole, my role in it, and the specific concerns that are on my mind at that time. It helps bring clarity to the situation, and by remembering that God has not left me alone here, I find that a new, supernatural element has entered the situation — the element of godly hope.
Empathy in the Long Haul
One of the unique dynamics of counseling in the church is that there will be a number of people who need a little attention every week over the long haul.
This “maintenance counseling” can come to seem like part of the weekly routine, more of a chore than a ministry. But I believe that in some ways, it may be among our most important functions, a test of our faithfulness.
Almost every church, for example, has one or more people whose spouse is an alcoholic. These folks will periodically want to tell the pastor what a rough week it was, and in most cases, all you can do is to encourage them to make it through another week. This goes on for years and years and may seem to the pastor like a small, unproductive thing, yet that encouragement can be what keeps that struggling person going.
When I was pastoring, there was a retarded young man in the church. He was retarded enough that he couldn’t hold a good job, but not so retarded that he didn’t know he was different. As a result, he was blue a lot of the time.
One of my ministries, therefore, was to seek him out each Sunday morning, call him by name, and spend two minutes talking about his hobby: collecting baseball hats. He never missed church. I’d see him in the pew during the service, and I knew he was waiting for his fix of affirmation, which I gladly gave him. It was no big deal, and there were no dramatic results to report, but I believe it was one of the best things I did week in and week out.
There’s a similar kind of need with people who are caring for aging parents. It’s a long-term, difficult task that wears people down. So you affirm them, you tell them how good it is to care for their parents, and you remind them that the responsibility won’t last forever.
You also help them to deal with the guilt of not being able to do more, or of feeling disloyal when they’re feeling their parents are being unreasonable. So you say it for them when you know it’s true: Your parent is turning into a child and acting childish; it happens; it’s not your fault; you’re doing a good job.
I remember one particular situation well. The old gentleman was in a nursing home, and when people from the church would visit him, he’d always say that his own family didn’t love him and never visited him. Then I’d get calls from his visitors saying his family was neglecting him and it’s just awful and what could we do about it.
I went to the couple — his family — and told them what was happening, and they told me how often they actually went to see him, which was regularly. So I suggested they start to keep a record of their visits and let me know when they’d been to see him.
Then when I went to see the gentleman himself, I’d say, “Isn’t it great that your kids were here to see you yesterday?” or whenever it was. Sometimes he’d forget they had been there, so he’d start to disagree. I’d say, “No, they were here yesterday. They told me about the visit on the phone this morning. Don’t you remember they were here?”
When that happened, it usually turned out that he could remember the visit, but he had forgotten or had convinced himself they should have been there all the time. I didn’t need to criticize him for his forgetfulness or self-pity, but I did need to keep affirming his kids and to brag on them to the father.
Empathy for the Hard to Like
So far we’ve been talking about empathy with people toward whom we feel positive, or at least neutral. But there will inevitably be some people who are hard to like, and feeling empathy toward them can be a challenge.
I’ll start by confessing that there are certain types of people who are usually my greatest challenges—for example, people who have uncritically adopted the attitudes and prejudices of a parent. The person has become a mirror image of the parent without realizing it and will say things like, “My dad always said that.…”
Another type I have trouble with are those who’ve had a significant event in their lives, and that event has become the yardstick, the point of reference, by which they now measure everything. The event may have been a war, a flood, a car wreck, a business failure, or a unique spiritual event. Rather than being grateful for the lessons they learned from that experience, they use the experience as a club, expecting other people to see things the same way.
The toughest people for me to empathize with, however, are those superspiritual individuals who manage to put the pastor on the defensive with such lines as “Why aren’t we doing more in the area of (pick one) evangelism/discipleship/missions/revival/training our young people?” They’re long on dispensing guilt, short on dispensing grace. Often they’re the ones who want a pat answer for each of life’s problems, even when those answers don’t exist.
Perhaps you have your own categories of people you find difficult to enjoy.
Will Rogers said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” I haven’t completely learned Will’s secret, but my approach with people to whom I have an initially negative reaction is this: If I know enough about anyone, I can learn to like him. Thus, if at first I don’t like someone, I figure I just don’t know that person well enough yet. So then my strategy is to probe gently to learn more.
Where were you raised?
Tell me about your dad, your mom, your brothers and sisters.
When you were a kid and you had a problem you needed to talk about, which parent did you go to? Why?
Who are some of the people you most admire?
What are the three things in life that you feel everyone ought to know?
As I get to know people in this way, I gain some insight into why they’re the way they are, and I usually do find something about them that I like or that makes me sympathetic.
Whatever technique we use, our goal is to lay a foundation for an ongoing ministry with them. I believe that love will find a way. Whenever I see the person, I’ll take the initiative to walk across the room, even if only for a minute, and say hello, ask about the family, and recall some common memory.
The bottom line, however, has to remain love. That’s not only our goal as ministers, but our calling as Christians. And that’s true even with those who are hard to like and those who are determined to be our enemies.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
