OnFireFit

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Added 2025-09-29 11:00:10 +0000 UTC

Good morning!

Are you empathetic or compassionate or a little of both (hopefully not neither LOL. I think my grammar is off with that but I think you get me :) At a work meeting recently, the doctor who spoke discussed the difference between empathy and compassion. I had never thought of it the way he described it.

Empathy is stepping into someone else’s pain. Feeling their pain. This can be valuable but it can sometimes cause a worsening of our own mental health and not truly help the other person.

Compassion is basically empathy in action. It is the step of action to move the needle. This is where we can release that pain and move toward healing. Sometimes it is simply through being present and listening but it doesn’t get stuck in the pain part.

Through many stories in the Bible, we see God’s compassion for people. Their self-inflicted pain created a trap they couldn’t escape. But God. He stepped in, took action and led the people into many “Promised Lands.”

The ultimate compassion, though, was when God sent His Son, Jesus, to free us from eternal doom. That freedom is for now, not just when we reach heaven. His compassion steps into all of our self-inflicted pains and doesn’t just sit in it with us but also leads us out.

Jesus did this one-on-one with so many people. Case after case of the sinners, so-called losers of society, met with the compassion of Jesus who knew their pain but didn’t leave them there. He led them out.

And then He asks us to do the same. Where can we meet with people in their pain but then help lead them out? Listening, being present, not trying to fix, speaking life into their situations. Sometimes we can do something tangible. Sometimes we need to just show them their value as God’s created child.

Where can you display empathy in action (compassion) today? Find one person and let me know what you did!

Romans 8:38-39—For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.