Empathy is difficult to obtain, but vital to achieve.  The ability to shift one's perspective of others through the voice of a narrator in writing is one of the reasons that I am passionate about literature.  Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors, recognizes the power that fiction has to create empathy which can not only change one's heart, but can also move us to action. She once shared in a speech that, “What the writer has to do is find a way to carve those enormous truths down to the size of the personal, to the size of individual reality, something that can fit inside a heart. The amazing power of fiction is that it can do that. It can create empathy. As a reader of fiction, you leave your own life for a while and allow someone else to move in, to inhabit your heart and your skin.” 


We are far too caught up in our own skin on a regular basis.  Social media, television, and society all urge the individual to promote one's self.  However, literature more often than not sends a different message.  Whether told in first person, third person limited, or third person omniscient, fiction causes us to view the world through the eyes of another...someone with a perspective different than our own.  Literature allows us to experience the lives of people whom we have never met and travel to places around the world that our eyes may never see and meet characters who, although they may be a fictional, represent humanity.  When we are able to love humanity as a whole then we are able to obtain empathy.


Later in that same speech, Kingsolver elaborated: “I believe the creation of empathy is a political act. The ability to understand and really feel for people who are different from ourselves—that’s a world-changing event. It’s the antidote to bigotry and spiritual meanness, and all the terrible things those deficiencies lead us into. That is why I feel lucky to get to do what I do: I get a little shot at changing the world."  Our world needs to be changed because there are far too many people who are hungry, alone, hurting, and in desperate need of love.  


Once empathy has found its way into our hearts, it is time for action.  If Christ had come to this earth and said, "I have empathy for your sin and your pain, but now that I am faced with death you are all on your own,"  we would all be lost.  However that isn't what happened...He fed the hungry...He healed the sick...He restored the broken...He loved the orphans and the widows...He went to the cross knowing that death was the only way to save humanity...He made it very clear that empathy must lead to action.  


Today I pray that God would continue to move me to action, not only now as I wait for the day that I will hold my precious baby boy in my arms, but every day in which He chooses to give me life and that He would continually reveal to me how to love others the way that He has loved me.