Please, Won't You Be My Neighbor?

The word empathy has been having a real moment recently, but it’s worth pausing on what it  means and how it’s different from sympathy. I had to look it up (what a rabbit hole). Sympathy keeps distance; empathy closes it. One observes, the other moves us toward compassion and, eventually, action. I really love this image by Dr. Susan David to better understand:

And while it may seem like the buzzword of the moment, empathy isn’t new. Long before we had language for it, people were naming and practicing it in different ways. Karuṇā in Hinduism and Buddhism (and others) is the path forward, born of recognizing that suffering is shared. In Jewish teaching, chesed (loving-kindness) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) remind us that empathy becomes real only when it moves into action. And for so many of us growing up, it was Mr. Rogers who taught us that empathy is part of being a neighbor and that our neighborhood stretches far beyond the houses on our block.

But let’s be real. Empathy is hard. Ebenezer Scrooge had to be visited by THREE GHOSTS to get it. How embarrassing. For the rest of us, it asks us to step outside ourselves, to sit with discomfort, to risk being changed by someone else’s story. It feels safer, easier to disengage, to look away, to organize people into neat categories of our own making. Indifference can feel safer, building walls instead of bridges.

Mother Teresa (I know….) once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” It sounds beautiful, but it also raises the harder questions: What does it really matter if someone else suffers? Isn’t it their life, their choices? Why should it fall on us to care?

Empathy doesn’t erase responsibility, and it doesn’t mean pretending choices don’t have consequences. What it does mean is refusing to let those choices become the whole story. It’s the practice of remembering that no matter what, we still belong to each other.

The alternative is indifference, and indifference changes nothing.

This week’s guest, John David Graham of Good Samaritan House, lives this out. His own journey through hardship and transformation shapes how he leads: not treating people as broken, not reducing them to their past, but seeing them as neighbors with futures. The work he does is a living reminder that empathy isn’t abstract. It’s the difference between walking past someone and walking alongside them.

While John’s story is transformative, growing empathy doesn’t require lived experience. You don’t need to have walked the same road to walk beside someone. What it does require is attention, curiosity, and the courage to close the distance. It is the bridge between noticing and doing.

If you're open to it... where in your life do you settle for sympathy, and what would it look like to lean into empathy, to move closer, to let it change you?