Sympathy
Christian Sympathy. — A young man called upon you a little while ago. He said, “Sir, you know my business. I have been struggling very hard, and you have kindly let me have some things on credit. But through the pressure of the times, I don’t know how it is, I seem to get very hard up. I think, sir, if I could weather the next month, I might be able to get on well. I have every prospect of having a trade yet, if I could but have a little more credit, if you could possibly allow it.” “Young man,” you have said, “I have had a great many bad debts lately. Besides you do not bring me any good security; I can not trust you.” The young man bowed, and left you. You did not know how he bowed in spirit as well as in body. That young man had a poor old mother and two sisters in the house, and he had tried to estaolish a little business that he might earn bread and cheese for them as well as for himself. For the last month they have eaten scarcely anything but bread and butter, and the weakest tea has been their drink, and he has been striving hard; but some one, poorer than he seemed to be, did not pay him the litle debt that was due to him, and he could not pay you. And if you had helped him, it might have been all well with him; and now what to do he can not tell. His heart is broken, his soul is swollen within him. That aged mother of his, and those girls, what shall become of them? You did not know his agony, or else you would have helped him. But you ought to have known. You never should have dismissed his case until you had known a little more about him. It would not be business-like, would it? No, sir, to be business-like is sometimes to be nothing else than devil-like. But I would not have you business like when it is so. Out on your business; be Christian-like.
Superficial Sympathy. — I have heard speak of a lady who was out in the snow one night, and was so very cold that she cried out, “Oh, those poor people that have such a little money, how little firing they have, and how pinched they must be! I will send a hundred weight of coals to twenty families, at the least.” But I have heard say that, when she reached her own parlor, there was a fine fire burning, and she sat there with her feet on the fender, and enjoyed an excellent tea, and she said to himself, “Well, it is not very cold, after all. I do not think that I shall send those coals; at any rate, not for the present.” The sufferer thinks of the sufferer, even as the poor help the poor.
The divine wonder is that this Lord of ours, “tho he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor,” and now takes a delight in succoring the poor. Having been tempted, he helps the tempted; his own trials make him desire to bless those who are tried.
Sympathy Born of Experience. — We cannot comfort others if we have never been comforted ourselves. I have heard — and I am sure that it is so — that there is no comforter for a widow like one who has lost her husband. Those who have had no children, and have never lost a child, may talk very kindly, but they cannot enter into a mother’s broken heart as she bows over yonder little coffin. If you have never known what temptations mean, you make poor work when attempting to succor the tempted. Our Lord obtained a blessing from suffer ing temptation; and, take my word for it, every one of you may do the same.
Brother, the Lord means to make of you a man that shall be used like Barnabas to be a “son of consolation.” He means to make a mother in Israel of you, my dear sister, that when you meet with others who are sorely east down, you may know how to drop in a sweet word by which they shall be comforted. I think you will one day say, “It was worth while to go through that sorrow to be enabled to administer relief to that wounded heart.”
Sympathy. — “Mother,” said a little girl once, “I cannot make it out; Mrs. Smith says I do her so much good. Poor Mrs. Smith has lost her husband, mother, and she is very sad. She sits and cries, and I get up and lay my cheek on her cheek, and I cry, and say that I love her, and then she says that she loves me, and that I com fort her.”
Just so. That is the truest form of consolation; is it not? “Weep with them that weep.” That is how God, my God, will hear me, feeling with me, sympathizing with me. “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.” So are we assured, but that is not all: “I am with thee, saith the Lord.”