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Stuart Briscoe and his wife Jill, who are natives of England, came to America some years ago to help launch a new congregation in the Midwest.
They had been in the States only a short while when they made their first trip to Chicago to attend a conference.
Briscoe’s car was low on fuel, but he was confident there would be plenty of gas stations in the downtown area.
He was wrong.
He ran out of gas in the middle of a thunderstorm, in the fast lane of one of Chicago’s infamously traffic-clogged interstates, right in the middle of rush hour.
He had no idea what to do.
He stepped out of the car, and immediately his suit was drenched.
“To their credit,” he later wrote, “the people of Chicago did not ignore me. Everyone rolled down their windows and told me exactly what they thought about me, even though they didn’t know who I was.”
Among the cars that rolled past was a beat-up old sedan. The driver of that car yelled something, too, but Briscoe had long since stopped listening.
He waited for something to happen. But for the longest time there was just the verbal abuse.
Then, suddenly, the same beat-up old car was coming by again. It stopped. The driver hopped out, opened up his trunk, produced a gas can, and poured it into Briscoe’s tank. He put the cap back on and turned to walk away.
Briscoe shouted, “Hold it! What’s going on?”
“No speak English! No speak English!” came the answer. The driver of the beat-up car did speak a little English, and Stuart discovered that this man had seen his plight, gone off the freeway, found a gas station, then gone back onto the interstate going the other way, gotten off, then back on again, winding his way through traffic to where the Briscoes were stranded.
He turned out to be a Puerto Rican who had been in Chicago just one week.
Most importantly, he knew what it felt like to be a stranger, to be a newcomer, and to be standing there needing help.
The apostle Paul wrote movingly about the power of empathy and compassion.
He and his missionary comrades had almost suffered death in the city of Ephesus, barely escaping the wrath of a mob infuriated by their advocacy of this strange new god named Jesus.
“We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure,” he wrote to the young church in Corinth, “so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).
But God was in it, he concluded.
The Lord, whom he described as “the God of all comfort,” “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
When we are in the midst of crushing circumstances, it may seem as if our suffering is meaningless.
But God is the ultimate spiritual alchemist. He can transform the lead of our present pain into the gold of future encouragement for someone else.
Who is able to empathize with someone devasted by abuse? Someone else who has been abused. Who can comfort someone who has lost a child? Someone else who has suffered that unimaginable loss. Who can grasp the shock and humiliation of being financially swindled? Someone else who knows exactly how that feels.
Ask God today to touch you with a special sensitivity to someone else’s pain.
By his grace and power, we can help another person make it through the storm.