The Power to Empathize

Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday, and I found myself thinking less about spectacle and more about listening. Less about performance and more about presence. Less about what the Holy Spirit empowers us to say— and more about what the Holy Spirit empowers us to understand.

I grew up in spaces where evidence of the Holy Spirit was measured in volume. How loudly someone praised. How fluently someone spoke in tongues. How powerfully someone prophesied.

And I do believe the Spirit still moves in all of those ways.

But as I sat with Acts chapter 2 again this week, I realized one of the Spirit’s greatest miracles was not that people spoke… but that people understood.

At Babel, language divided humanity. Pride made people unreachable to one another. Words became walls, and humanity scattered.

But at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit did not erase difference. The Spirit honored it. Parthians, Medes, Egyptians, Arabs, and Romans all heard the wonders of God in their own language.

Not sameness.  Understanding.

And that is what empathy really is: the sacred work of hearing another person’s humanity without demanding they become identical to us first.

The older I get, the more I believe that if we knew enough about people, we would judge them less harshly.

If we knew the grief beneath the anger, the fear beneath the control, the rejection beneath the arrogance, the exhaustion beneath the irritability—

we might soften.

The Holy Spirit gives us power for that.

Power to pause before condemning. Power to listen beneath words. Power to discern pain beneath behavior. Power to remain tender in a cruel world.

Peter is proof.

Before Pentecost, Peter cut off ears. After Pentecost, he opened doors.

Before Pentecost, his world was small and tribal. But eventually the Spirit led him to declare: “God shows no partiality.”

The Spirit enlarged Peter’s heart.

And that is one of the clearest signs of spiritual maturity: not merely ecstatic experiences, but expanded compassion.

The greatest evidence of the Holy Spirit is not how loudly we speak, but how deeply we understand.

Because when people feel understood, walls begin to fall. And wherever walls fall, the Spirit is near.