Today brings a reminder of last year, when five deaths occurred in one week – four among my GPS community and one a little closer. It was an awful, awful week, yet I’m standing on the periphery saying that. There is absolutely no way I can connect a single dot to understand what these families suffered, nor what they are still suffering today. It was the sort of week that left you with whiplash, wondering what just happened and where God was in all of it.
There is no better way to honor these families than be reposting Brené Brown’s short video about empathy versus sympathy. Sympathy removes you from someone else’s sorrow while empathy creates a connection.
We don’t need to have all the right words, nor do we have to make a grand gesture. We just have to climb down that rickety ladder because “rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.”