Slipping your foot into an odd-fitting shoe

Photo by Meg Kannan on Unsplash

I was livid to be honest. A friend had just told me what I hadn’t wanted to hear. I hadn’t expected it. How can you expect to hear things that should never be said, friend to friend? It stung, and the barb was impossible to remove without what felt like heart surgery.

Fast forward a few years.

Roles are reversed, just me in the bearer-of-bad-news position, and another man on the receiving end.

I go to a mentor and ask her how I’m able to convey what’s on my heart. She says, ‘Ever felt like you’ve been in the other guy’s position?’ — check that — ‘yep!’

Mmmm…

Silence, just eye contact… She says,
‘You know what you’ve got to do then?’

Sensing some heart-work on my radar, I feel that sinking feeling grab me. Suddenly, as I revisit that grief of that earlier interaction, the one that hurt, God invites me into empathy for my younger self — but only as a departure on the way to empathy for the man I’m about to communicate with.

Suddenly I’m unwilling to go charging in, to give him that piece of my mind I had to give him, to chastise him for something he shouldn’t have done, to set him straight, to set him right.

Unwilling. While his size 9 sits awkwardly on my size 11 foot. How on earth am I meant to get that stupid shoe on? Who has feet that small? Well, how weird it must be for someone with size 9 feet to wear my size 11s.

The point is our footprints,
like our viewpoints, are different.

In the first incident, my hurt was real, and the way I was now about to communicate was also going to really hurt. Perhaps part of me wanted it to sting. Part of me who wanted to get back, even the score, to exact reparation.

But that foot of his was a frustrating reminder he’s not going to see the way I do. He won’t understand the way I do. The words of mine, the message I need to give, well, it just won’t work. Not in its present form. Our perspectives are worlds different even though we supposedly love each other as mates.

Empathy is the ability to feel
inside another person’s reality.

God wasn’t satisfied for me to respond to my friend until I’d noticed how different my experience of wearing his shoe was.

Not being able to get it on my foot showed me how impossible it was to truly know how hurt he’d be. That stopped me in my tracks. If I couldn’t be sure how hurt he’d be, and in what way, caution was advised.

How would I like it if it were done to me? Well, I knew how that felt!

I’d been hurt in the same situation. That’s all I knew. As a gauge it was enough.

When Jesus said, ‘treat others how you wish to be treated’ He meant it for good reason.

We cannot respond wisely in potentially hurtful situations without pondering how they might hear the words and feel our tone and receive the mood of our communication.

If only we’d grieve our hurts, afresh, before we issued a hard word to someone else.

If we wouldn’t have another person hurt us, why would we allow ourselves to hurt somebody else?

Empathy takes us deeply into the experience of others,
to see as they see, to feel as they feel.