| Finding the Way |
Chapter 5 |
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The answer to these questions is that in heaven He is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities.” He sympathizes with us in all the experiences of our lives. The word sympathy means suffering with. If two musical instruments, standing near each other, are tuned to the same key, and a performer plays on one of them, the chords of the other respond too, as if invisible fingers were playing the same music on the strings. When two friends are side by side, and one of them is passing through an experience of either joy or pain, the other shares the experience. So Christ in heaven sympathizes with his friends on the earth in their experiences, and is instantly touched with the feeling of their gladness and their grief.
We believe all this as a doctrine, but what meaning has it for us in our own lives? What is Christ in heaven to us in a personal, practical way? If the truth of the sympathy of Christ becomes real in our experience, it will bring great strength and inspiration to us. We are helped in times of weakness or suffering by the consciousness that human friends are thinking of us and sharing our trouble. Immeasurably greater is the help which it gives us to know that Christ in heaven is touched by our pain and feels with us.
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