Irene had a new experience today.

With the assistance of her technician, Pat, she inserted a needle into each of the respective dialysis “buttonholes” today.  There are two buttonholes in her right bicep region.

The purpose of this new adventure is for her to become familiar with how the insertion is done so that when she’s traveling and is dialyzed at another location she can insert the needles in the hope of avoiding a needle infiltration.  The angle of the needle insertion is critical to a successful process.

Irene is on meds for an upper respiratory infection; however, she’s making slow and sure progress.

Thanks for caring,

Dave

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Imagine a living, loving, infinite, all knowing and powerful God, who has no beginning or end because he has always been and always “is”.

Muse on that thought for a moment ….

It’s a significant challenge for the finite to imagine the INFINITE, isn’t it?

God communicates to His created human race that he is an extraordinary God and that His plans are “exceedingly and abundantly more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3).  That’s an audacious statement …. especially because many of us have very ambitious imaginations!!!  However, God proclaims that we cannot even begin to ask or imagine how exceedingly and abundantly He is able to work in and through our lives.

If you were God, what method would you employ to convey your love to people?  How would you go about imparting the infinite to finite human beings?

Perhaps God might demonstrate His love toward us using sympathy ….

Sympathy — connection to another’s feelings to parallel experiences

Or, perhaps He could demonstrate His love toward us using empathy ….

Empathy — a choice to enter the perspective of another

Or, what if God used a form of interpathy….?  Interpathy….?  What is interpathy, you ask?

Interpathy is an intentional cognitive envisioning and affective of experience of another’s thoughts and feelings, even though the thoughts rise from another process of knowing, the values grow from another frame of moral reasoning, and the feelings spring from another basis of assumptions.
David Augsberger (1986) Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures

I think the word interpathy is both intriguing and fascinating ….

God’s ways are certainly not our ways.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD.
Isaiah 55:8

God uses a form of “interpathy” to demonstrate the passion and love He has for the created order.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.
John 3:16

For while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8

God became human through the person of Jesus to identify with every human emotion, intellectual thought and physical reality of that which we experience on this earth.  If

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