"... what emotion would best describe how you feel right now?"

A thought by Kyle Idleman, from his book, One at a Time (p. 68). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon to buy the book.)

That is a good question.

Kyle continues, "Depending on the research you look at, there are anywhere from six to thirty-four thousand emotions you can experience. I won’t list all thirty-four thousand here. You probably don’t need a list to narrow down how you feel most of the time, anyway. If you’re not sure about your emotional state, ask a few of the people you do life with. If they look at you like they’re afraid to answer, then irritable or temperamental may be the diagnosis."

He goes on, "I decided to read through the Gospels to try to determine if there was a primary emotion Jesus felt. He is described as experiencing exhaustion, joy, anger, frustration, disgust, grief, loneliness, rejection, and dread. But the one emotion attributed to Jesus more than any other is compassion.

"Most of our emotions tend to be self-centered. How we feel is usually determined by what we’re experiencing at any given moment. Jesus’s primary emotion was determined by what others were going through."

Kyle says, "My wife will tell you I can’t watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie without wiping away a few tears. And my heart is broken when a commercial comes on with images of starving children living in poverty. If I see someone in pain, I feel for them, and for a long time I understood compassion to be a feeling, so I thought of myself as a compassionate person.

"But as I traced the times Jesus had compassion in the Gospels, I noticed that a conjunction almost always followed his feeling of compassion. It’s not 'Jesus had compassion.' It’s 'Jesus had compassion and . . .'

"In Matthew 20:34, Jesus had compassion on two blind men and touched their eyes. In Mark 1:41, Jesus had compassion on a leper and healed him. In Mark 6:34, Jesus had compassion on the people and began feeding them, and in Matthew 9:35–38, Jesus had compassion on the people and prayed for them."

Kyle then said, "When Jesus felt compassion, it was followed by action and it always created a story. So many of the one at a time stories in the Gospels start with Jesus’s compassion."

And that is how He made such a difference and that is how we can too! Yes, yes! #continuethought

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