It was a bad customer service experience, and I was the victim. But I don’t want to talk about my victimhood. I’ll get over it. The short version of the story is that we had made a service appointment several weeks ago with a promise that we would receive text-message reminders as the service date neared. Well, the service date came and went with no reminders and no service. In fact, the reason for what we discovered was a cancellation was quite understandable, and, after all, it was a scheduled service call, not an emergency. The frustrating lapse in customer service came after the cancellation. The first time I called about the cancellation, I was told that it couldn’t be helped, but that I might be put on a waiting list for future service, but that they had no idea whether the new service call might be in a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months. Stuff happens. Yes, I was frustrated, and I am afraid my frustration showed – not in expletives or accusations but in tone.

I waited a week to make my next call, and as my frustration subsided, I vowed to myself not to add to the tension and anger that fills too much of our social interaction in our age of victimhood.

Back to customer service below.

Empathy, by dictionary definition is “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”

Empathy is under attack in our age of anxiety. Joe Rigney is a pastor and professor who has written a book about empathy, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Rigney “argues that modern empathy can become a counterfeit virtue and a form of emotional manipulation when it is detached from biblical truth.” (Here’s a counterpoint:  Mere Orthodoxy Review.) Empathy is also under attack in the secular world with self-described atheist writer Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy in its tenth week on the New York Times Bestseller list. Saad believes modern empathy – feeling another’s pain – is an irrational form of altruism that has created a “horrifying system of inverse morality.” Victimhood is celebrated and success is demonized.

The Christian pastor and the atheist writer agree that the empathy they deride is a perversion of a better kind of empathy described as compassion or sympathy.

Yes, imagining what it would be like to be in another person’s situation can be debilitating, counterproductive, and lead to a loss of compassion and constructive helping. A former American president was famous for feeling our pain, but sometimes we need more. While not simply “feeling your pain,” however, empathy is a Biblical virtue. We are to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15).

Back to customer service. Before I made my (hopefully) final customer service call, I was pretty sure whoever I talked to would not rejoice at taking my call, but I didn’t want her to weep, either. I assumed I was not the only one with a cancelled service appointment having to call to reschedule (and I was correct).

So, no accusations or blaming tone: situation to be resolved and empathy to be shown to that poor customer service worker whose day was hardly full of rejoicing. I think I may have succeeded. Our service call has been rescheduled for seven weeks from now. Our conversation was friendly in tone, and she told me it was all the computer’s fault.

I tell you this not to make myself the hero of my own story. I am not. I tell you this to suggest that rejoicing and weeping with others may be just what our age of victimhood and anxiety needs. Lesson still being learned.