Chris' Christian Blog

August 14, 2018

"August 14, 2018" 

Prompt: "Teach me to feel another's woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me." Alexander Pope, from the poem Universal Prayer https://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/universal_prayer_14949. Let this quote from Alexander Pope inspire your blog entry?"

I believe empathy, which Mr. Pope is referring to, is the most important quality one can possess. I had an instructor in one of my dependency disorder classes tell me one time that if he could teach me the quality of empathy I would be great as a helper. I did not understand at that point what empathy was. I confused it with empathy. Now I know that empathy the ability to objectively project oneself into the situation of another. I have come to realize that each of us responds to others based on past experiences. If I am really upset with another person, even when the anger is justified, I often find that it is not that person I am really angry with at all. Rather it is some person who has hurt me in my past when I was too little to fight back that I am angry with. The situation today has simply triggered some repressed memory with all the attendant anger and I am usually overreacting to the current situation. Empathy helps me realize that most people do the same thing. We pack around a huge bag of garbage with us from the past. How can we trust God when we have learned that people basically cannot be trusted? I will soon be working as a Christian counselor and my job will be to help people come to terms with their past so that they can be content with their present.

"Prompt: Tell us about the most amazing place in nature that you’ve been to. What made it so amazing for you?"

Without a doubt the most amazing thing I have ever seen in nature was Niagara Falls. It boggles the mind to stand there watching the falls as over a billion estimated gallons of water per minute roar over the edge! It is little wonder that Native Americans in the Niagara Falls area worshiped the falls and sacrificed the Maid of the Mist to it every year. If I did not know that Jesus Christ had created Niagara and everything else in the world I might have been tempted to call Niagara Falls some sort of deity. It absolutely boggles the mind to stand there and take in the sites and sounds!




MarvinDSchrebe