HOW TO SYMPATHIZE by John S. Bunting

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 13, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 11.

HOW TO SYMPATHIZE.

By John S. Bunting

[Rev. John S. Bunting, in the S. S. Times.]

YOUR sympathy for another should lay hold, not only of the fact of his suffering, but also of his yearning to triumph over it and know the freedom of joy. You must reach that, and share it with him, if you would share all that he feels. To feel for his grief is good, but to aid his yearning to rise above its bondage is even better. To share the one with him calls for unselfish interest, but to share the other calls for love's finest ingenuity and service. Does your sympathy merely mourn, or does it also seek to deliver?

With many of us sympathy needs not added intensity, but clearer perception. It needs to see that beneath his dark burden the man may be a prisoner looking for light and joy, which you can not indeed bestow as a gift, but which you may yet put him in the way of securing by leading him to some of the sources from which it is drawn.

Console him, then, with the healing story of some great life or splendid work; refresh him with a walk amid the "miracle of God's flowers and trees" in the great world of the out-of-doors; or unburden him by bringing him near the burdened heart of some life that cries out for release louder, it may be, than does his. When you do this you will do better things for him than when you merely "feel sorry for him." It will not be merely diverting the man's thoughts, it will be delivering the man. It will be like helping Job to pray for his friends, or urging Jonah to go on to Nineveh, or accompanying the leper as he goes to pay his vows to the priest. As Muriel Strode says, "Only what you send forth from yourself can still the deeper crying of your soul."