I was raised to be a thinker and a doer.  “Use your mind, son,” my dad said.  Once I had something figured out, I pushed ahead with sheer willpower.  My mind and my will got a lot of exercise, but my emotions got almost none. 

Little boys in my western town were not feelers.  They were doers.  To be frank, there was one emotion we could express – anger.  Boys could get angry and girls could cry. 

Actually, I had lots of very deep feelings, as did my Dad.  I never doubted Dad’s love for me.  Now in his 70s, he often cries.  Those emotions always were there.  He just didn’t know how to find them.  Dad’s grandchildren helped him find words for his emotions.

When my daughter was about two years old she broke her arm and was in a lot of pain.  At the end of a long day when my wife and I finally got her to sleep, my tired wife looked at me and asked, “How do you feel?” 

Can you guess my answer?  “Fine,” I said.

“Fine?  You can’t feel fine,” she countered.  “You’re just going to have to work harder at finding some feeling words.  You can feel anxious or sad or grateful.  But you can’t feel fine about what just happened today.”

Of course, I didn’t feel fine.  I felt relieved that my daughter was going to be okay.  When I finally found the feeling of relief, and expressed it by saying, “I feel relieved,” my wife hugged me and told me she felt loved by the way I took care of our family.

To this day I keep a list of about 50 emotions posted beside my computer.  Sometimes during the day something will happen that pushes my emotional button.  Because my emotional vocabulary isn’t very strong, I may look at the list to see if I can identify my feeling. 

The more I explore my emotional health, the more I become convinced that almost all of the hundreds of possible emotions can be placed in two categories – positive emotions and painful emotions.  So I don’t have to learn hundreds of emotional responses.  I need only learn to empathize with a potentially positive or potentially painful emotion.

The Apostle Paul used these words to express the same idea:  “Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.”  So if people express positive emotions, we should rejoice with them.  If they express painful emotions, we should mourn with them.  It’s simple, and it’s powerful.

For me, one of the critical requirements for proper emotional responding has been to develop empathy.  I’m still in the preschool of empathy, but I’m working to develop the ability to discern emotions in others and then experience, within myself, the same emotion. 

I’m not speaking of sympathy.  That’s simply the mental awareness of the general plight of someone else with no real sacrificial sharing in what is being felt.  I’m good at that.

This summer I’ve been reading through the Gospels, looking for events where Jesus shows empathy.  I’ve not been disappointed.  Several times he is said to have been “moved with compassion” as he discerns the needs and pain of others.

When I’m able to enter people’s emotional state and empathize with them – rejoicing with them when they express positive emotions and mourning with them when they express painful emotions -- a little miracle occurs.  In both instances, the people and I may feel very blessed.

My emotional needs certainly are not lessoning.  I needed comforting by my mom when the town bully made me cry, and I need comforting some 40 years later if I have a bad day at the office.  I needed my dad to rejoice with me when I led my Peewee baseball team in home runs.  Now decades later, if I preach a good sermon I still need someone with whom I can rejoice.

August often is an emotionally charged time in a university town.  Students are back in town, trying to get their dorm rooms or apartments figured out and worrying about the new semester.  Parents are getting ready to send their children off to school, and the kids are worrying about sports and music and who their friends will be this year.

This would be a great month to be particularly sensitive, to ask the right questions and to work hard at “rejoicing with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn.”