Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Thomas Nelson (February 18, 2020)
Language: English
How can we love our neighbors amid so much division and hurt?
Loving your neighbor as yourself would be easy if your neighbors were all people you understood, people you agreed with, people like you. But what about playground bullies, colleagues, refugees, online adversaries? They're all our neighbors, and Jesus said to love them. Every one. But how?
Lauren Casper believes the key is the lost art of empathy, stepping into other people’s shoes and asking what if?—what if it were my child? What if it were me? Casper helps us discover how to
identify our blind spots and tune our hearts to the stories around us;
seek and extend forgiveness with grace and humility; and
engage in diverse and meaningful relationships.
Following these steps will enable us to connect in simple but life-altering ways, to respond to conflict with grace, bring about needed change, and shine God’s unconditional love into a dark world.
Lauren Casper is a writer, speaker, and amateur baker. She is the founder of the popular blog laurencasper.com and has had numerous articles syndicated by The Huffington Post, The TODAY Show, Yahoo! News, and several other publications. Lauren and her husband, John, have two beautiful children and one fluffy dog. They make their home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Enjoy an Excerpt from the book:
Book Excerpt Ch.10 “The Next Right Thing”
Last summer I
spent hours at the community pool with my children. We had reached that magical
place where both kids knew how to swim well enough for me to sit on a lounge
chair and watch from a distance as they splashed and dove and jumped off the
diving board. There was a steady rotation of friends for the kids to play with,
as well as parents for me to enjoy adult conversation with.
One afternoon I
was preoccupied by an article I had read that morning about children being
separated from their parents as families sought asylum in our nation. More and
more information was coming out about the conditions they were forced to
endure, and the national outcry had reached fever pitch. It was weighing heavy
on my heart, so I, thinking it might be helpful to process this together,
raised the issue with an acquaintance at the pool. I was stunned when she said
she didn’t know what I was talking about.
This story had
been frontpage news for several weeks. How could she have missed it? Then she
informed me that she had known something was going on, but she considered it
too upsetting to know about, and so she had avoided the news altogether for
over a month. In fact, she had stopped listening to the news on radio and
television, checked only the email tab on her computer each day, and turned off
all breakingnews notifications on her phone. She had put a lot of effort into
protecting herself with detachment.
As shocked as I
was that she was unaware of a crisis of such magnitude, a crisis that was
harming human beings to such a degree that doctors classified it as a form of
torture, I also recognized a bit of myself in her response. I, too, feel the
pull of detachment when things break my heart.
We tend to think
of such detachment as a sort of safe neutrality. We may not be doing
anything to help, we tell ourselves, but at least we aren’t part of the
problem. What we don’t see is the damage we do—to ourselves and others—when
we move through life wearing noisecanceling headphones. Nor do we see the
waste of all the potential good we might do if we engaged.
What might happen
if we instead chose to redirect all the effort we invest in detachment into
flinging the doors of our hearts wide open? What might happen if we turned
toward the crisis rather than away from it? Perhaps it would actually make our
hearts stronger. Perhaps we could use our creativity to act with compassion and
make a difference in someone else’s life. We’ll never know how we could have
played a role in changing the world for the better if we aren’t brave enough to
open ourselves up to the things that scare us.
The lengths to
which we’ll go to distance ourselves from knowing too much about the suffering
of others stems from a desire to protect ourselves from feeling the weight of
this broken world. We’re afraid we’ll buckle beneath it. But our efforts do
nothing to alleviate that suffering. I’m pretty sure that when a tree falls in
the forest and no one is there to see or hear it, the tree still falls. Like it
or not, when faced with heartbreak, we are always making a choice—to love or
not to love.
Empathy is an
invitation to love by choosing action. God has been shaping and preparing us
our entire lives for this calling—to love our neighbor. Whether the neighbor is
across the street or across the ocean, in the county jail or the nursing home,
in the rehabilitation center or the maternity ward, at the border or the halls
of congress, on the school campus or in the office cubicle—we make little
choices to love or not love every day.
If we’ll let it,
the brokenness of the world can be the beginning of a beautiful journey. So,
what’s breaking your heart? What are you avoiding out of fear it might keep you
up at night if you linger a little longer?
Is it hungry
children?
Homelessness?
Those battling
addiction?
Those who are
incarcerated?
Refugees?
Cancer patients?
Teenage mothers?
Gun violence?
Racial injustice?
The effects of
climate change on our children?
Lack of access to
clean water?
LGBTQ+ youth?
Victims of sexual assault?
Bereaved parents or spouses?
People struggling
with mental illness?
Don’t turn away
from whatever it is that makes your heart break and your eyes well up with
tears. Sit with it a little longer and see where your heart might lead you.
Maybe you’ll find yourself working at the county jail, volunteering at a
rehabilitation center, or serving at a homeless shelter. Perhaps you’ll sit
fidgeting in a basement meeting room one evening and find yourself diving
headfirst into activism. You might finally begin working for that law degree or
find yourself demanding justice via megaphone on the steps of the Capitol
building. Maybe you’ll pass out hugs at a Pride Parade and find yourself locked
in the embrace of a son or daughter who hasn’t known the hug of a mother or
father in years.
Where is empathy
leading you to love? You might be scared, I know I am, but the next right thing
is simply showing up—and we can do it.
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