"I have something important I want to talk about," I told Shannon. My feet dragged through the dusty mulch beneath the swing as I pushed myself in a lazy circle. We were seniors in high school, far too old to be occupying this neighborhood playground, but it was always empty at this twilight hour, so we often spent a few minutes talking here in the evenings before I dropped her off at her parents' house.

She sat quietly on the swing next to mine, waiting for me to go on. We'd only been dating for about six months, but we'd known each other for nearly six years, so she had learned that it took me a while to speak my feelings. In a few months, we would be heading to separate colleges, and we had begun having conversations about what our relationship would look like in the midst of that.

"There are a lot of different meanings of the word 'love' in English," I finally said. "But my parents have always taught me when I'm using it with people, I shouldn't use it flippantly. It ought to really mean something. And I want you to know that it means something special for you." Shannon's eyes widened – this was not the conversation she'd been expecting – but she didn't interrupt. I paused, unsure if I could actually say the three words I'd practiced in my head so many times. When I did speak them, the three words somehow grew to five: "I think I love you."

This was how I first told Shannon (now my wife) that I loved her. It was fumbling, it was awkward, and I'm pretty sure I actually said somewhere in there that I use "love" to describe my feelings toward Taco Bell... but I've done my best to block that part out of my memory.

The point I was trying to make, meandering as it was, was true. I had been taught that loving someone was not just a little fluttering sensation in our stomachs when we thought of them – it was a choice we made, a promise that we had to live out in our actions toward that person, not just for a few moments but for a lifetime.

As I have grown up, I have come to deeply appreciate the seriousness with which my parents treated the word. It has significantly shaped who I'm becoming today, because it emphasizes that love requires a relationship. It cannot happen in the flash of a moment – it takes the daily work of building trust, mutuality, respect, and following through on promises to prioritize the other person's well-being over your own ambitions. And I believe this is true not just in romantic love, not just in a marriage, but in the love we followers of Christ are called to embody toward our neighbors.

I would also argue we cannot demonstrate Christ-like love without practicing empathy for them. Love without empathy, without feeling the hopes and dreams and disappointments of our neighbor, is not love at all.

How often do we heap gifts upon a person without first understanding what they need or want? How often do we pray for someone without first hearing from them their pain? How often do we offer advice to a neighbor without first listening to what has brought them to this place? Acting, even with the best of intentions, is not love unless there is a genuine relationship in place, and a relationship requires trust, mutuality, respect, and empathy.

Recently, empathy has been dragged through the mud by prominent far-right Christian leaders. They have promoted headlines like "the sin of empathy" as they have tried to position empathy as the enemy of moral decision-making, as if only "rational" thought, untarnished by "feelings" such as empathy, can lead us toward Christian virtue.

But empathy is not only important for moral decision-making, it is necessary for it.

Jesus taught us that love is Christian virtue. Take the story of Jesus with the widow in Nain (Luke 7:11-15), for example:

Soon afterward [Jesus] went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, “Do not cry.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stopped. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

As far as we know, neither this widow nor her son (prior to his death) had any kind of faith in Jesus as the Son of God. She did not run to Jesus asking for his help – in fact, according to the story, she does not seem to be aware of Jesus' presence at all. She was simply in this funeral procession grieving the loss of her only son. When Jesus saw her, he was "moved with compassion" and went to her, understood the pain she felt, and returned her son to her. This is empathy at a scale and intensity that only the Son of God could achieve.

Empathy is an intrinsic part of the journey to follow Christ. Christ did not become human to be able to rationalize with us; Christ became human to empathize with us, to feel what we feel, to show us that even God desires to sit with us, to break bread with us, to listen to our troubles and help us find the way through them.

For God so loved the world that God sent Jesus, God's only Son, into the world to lead us into the light of the fullness of God's love.

May it be so.