Somebody once told me they thought everyone should work in a hospice care facility as a post teenager, they would learn the value of life… I wonder if that’s true… I think back to my wild youth filled days… I don’t think it would have made any difference to me.
I don’t think I really understood the value of life until the day my oldest son almost died when a bumper fell off a scrap pile in Ramsey MN, missing him by maybe an inch. But the years leading up to that day were filled with some of the worst events I can imagine.
February 1991 My father passed away from cancer, born August 1 1920, he was still very young, but I had only seen him a few times and barely talked to him for years, not out of some rift, I just didn’t have “time”. Then my sister Laurie got hit by a train on a Cold September morning in 1993 at age 28, leaving behind two children. Only a few months later, Chris was born, and I almost lost him in childbirth…
That’s when I started to recognize how fragile life was. That’s when I started to feel the pain other people felt, it was the conception of my compassion… but not the birth. It was only a few years later I found myself holding a shotgun, feeling the rage and anger that was fully “justified”, an anger so strong over the violation of an innocent child… I probably wouldn’t have spent a day in prison, because it was fully justifiable…
God’s plan for my life was unfolding, I received into my life the gift of empathy.
Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, and to see things from their perspective. It involves experiencing another person’s emotions and thoughts, as if they were your own, while still maintaining a sense of your own distinct identity.
Empathy is different than sympathy. Sympathy simply means you understand the pain… empathy means you actually feel that pain.
Many times I find I need to build walls and boundaries to protect myself from feeling the pain and suffering of others. You may not understand this, but there is another reading this blog that knows exactly what I mean.
I can’t fully explain how and what I feel, I just know that when I see another person suffering, it can overwhelm my emotions and I can start to feel that pain as if it were my very own, as if the loss they feel is my loss, as if the joy they have is my own. It is weird, I know, I am not sure why I feel that emotion but I do, and it can be so exhausting that I need to find ways to manage this emotional stress so that I don’t shut down and curl up into the fetal position myself.
If you know me, you know I always make a joke or speak a bit of sarcasm, or even dismiss a topic, it is a defense mechanism, otherwise I could short circuit and become a blob on the floor. Does this make me a “sissy” I don’t know, maybe from some perspectives its a show of weakness, but I really don’t care, I am genX… stick your opinion up your nose (just a bit of sarcasm for you) I honestly don’t feel the need to prove my “manliness” anymore, I had that hang up in my teens, that is a different blog post from a while ago, Im sure one day I will revisit that mess.
So, back to the value of life,
I have an event that scars my heart, a decision from years gone by, a choice that can not be undone, a pain so deep, it only can be touched by the best of human emotion surgeons, and even then, its so deep, the best can not truly find that scar. I remember that day so well, the day she decided to say she never wants to talk to me again… I can’t imagine the pain I caused her by not being there. What she doesn’t know about me will remain forever a mystery to her. She is fully justified in never wanting to hear from me, but I know she cant forget me, because I can’t forget about her… maybe that’s why God allows me to feel his emotional tie to every story I hear, maybe that is why I was given the cursed gift of empathy, because back then, I felt nothing for anyone.
I can’t undo my past, and to be totally transparent, I believe God has blessed my wretched existence with much more than I could have achieved on my own, I very much believe that in spite of my wretchedness, God chose me, and calls me his own, because apart from God? I was a pretty horrible, and a pitiful creature.
As I close this blog, please understand, life now is great, life then is what an ignorant young man thought was great, but that was total ignorance.
God took me and washed away that life, made me new, and He can do the same for you.
Praise God He saves, and never gave up on a monster like me.
Charlie