This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. This week covers the Priesthood Session of the April 1991 Conference.
I've been thinking about how hard it is to get children and teenagers (and maybe all of us, really) to think and care about other people—really care about them. It's so easy to dismiss whole categories of people. Old people. Mean people. Disabled people. Poor people. Even if you aren't deliberately cruel to anyone, it's so easy to think "those people" are wholly different from you, or to assume they don't really feel and matter as you do yourself. I remember thinking some of those thoughts myself when I was young, much as I tried to be a compassionate person.
But as you age maybe you begin to catch glimpses of the real people behind those categories. Maybe you start to edge into those categories yourself. I remember sitting quietly some years ago, reading 1 Corinthians 10:13, "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man," and hearing that phrase "such as is common to man" run over and over again in my head. I'm just like people I used to look down on, I thought. Not better. Not more patient. Not smarter. Not more righteous. Common to man.
Is this realization a function only of life experience? I suppose missions can help teach it too. Maybe it comes through any service, and a deliberate practicing of empathy? But I agree with Elder J. Richard Clarke that it's something we must somehow find a way to teach:
Brethren, we are the sons of God….We must expand our awareness as quorums and as individuals, and increase our caring capacity. Let us live righteously and extend the healing power of the priesthood, through loving quorum service, to “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees.”
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