She Saw the Boy

My name is Todd Mayson, and this is Audio Story Time—a place where songs, memories, and the life behind them meet.

I have heard something troubling in Christian conversation lately.

The suggestion that empathy can be sinful.

That trying to feel another person’s pain can somehow lead us away from truth.

That understanding people makes us weak.

That if we look too closely at what someone has suffered, we might excuse what they have done.

I understand the concern underneath some of that.

There are times when compassion gets confused with agreement. There are times when understanding someone’s pain gets treated as though it removes responsibility. And there are times when people use their wounds to avoid facing the wounds they have caused.

But that is not empathy.

Empathy does not ask us to call wrong right.

It asks us to remember that the person who did wrong is still a person.

It asks us to look at someone closely enough to recognize fear, grief, confusion, or pain—even when consequences are still necessary.

I know that because one of the clearest experiences of empathy in my life happened while I was being taken into adult jail.

I was seventeen years old.

I had stolen a car and credit cards. I had been involved in a dangerous police chase. I had broken the law, frightened people, and made choices that could have caused even greater harm than they did.

I am not innocent in that story.

Empathy does not require me to pretend that I am.

By then, I had spent years running—from houses, from fear, from shame, from questions about my sexuality, and from a life I did not know how to live inside.

But the people arresting me could not see all of that.

They saw the car.

The credit cards.

The chase.

The charges.

And they were not wrong to see those things. Those things were real.

But they were not the whole story.

When the police began deciding where we would go, the difference between me and the sixteen-year-old boy who had been with me became clear.

He was still considered a juvenile.

I had been seventeen for a little over a month, and under South Carolina law, as far as the crime was concerned, I was an adult.

He went to juvenile detention.

I went to adult jail.

The law saw an adult.

But when they booked me, I cried like a little boy.

I was trembling. I was terrified. The running had finally stopped, and everything I had been outrunning seemed to catch up with me in that room.

The officer who took my fingerprints and mugshot was a woman.

She did her job.

She did not tear up the charges.

She did not open the door and send me home.

She did not tell me that what I had done did not matter.

But she was not harsh with me.

Somehow, she seemed to understand that there was more standing in front of her than a bad kid who had finally gotten caught.

She had empathy.

I cannot know exactly what she thought. She did not know my childhood. She did not know about my father, the fear, the religious shame, the running, or the confusion I carried. She did not know the whole road that had brought me into that booking room.

But she knew I was scared.

And she treated me like a human being.

That matters.

After taking my fingerprints and mugshot, she led me toward a holding cell. There was already an adult man inside, and there was an open bunk waiting for whoever came next.

That whoever was me.

Before she opened the door, she spoke sternly to the man inside. She told him he had better not harm me in any way.

Then she opened the cell.

I walked inside.

And the metal door clanked shut behind me.

She did not save me from jail.

But she protected me in the only way she could.

She saw fear where someone else might have seen only guilt.

That is the part I keep returning to.

She saw fear where others might have seen only guilt.

The guilt was real.

So was the fear.

She did not have to choose between them.

Empathy allowed her to hold both truths at the same time.

I had done something wrong.

And I was a frightened seventeen-year-old entering an adult cell.

Both were true.

Her empathy did not interfere with justice. It changed how another human being was treated while justice took its course.

That seems deeply Christlike to me.

Jesus continually saw what other people trained themselves not to see.

Where the crowd saw a sinner, Jesus saw a person.

Where others saw someone unclean, Jesus saw someone suffering.

Where religious people saw a category, Jesus saw a life.

He did not have to abandon truth in order to come near.

He did not have to deny responsibility in order to restore dignity.

And He did not protect Himself from another person’s suffering by calling tenderness weakness.

The Jesus I am trying to follow does not step around human pain to keep His theology clean.

He enters it.

He weeps with people.

He touches people others will not touch.

He listens to people others have already judged.

He sees them.

That woman officer saw me.

Not completely. No one can know another person completely.

But she saw enough to protect something vulnerable.

Sometimes empathy begins there.

Not with fully understanding another person’s life, but with recognizing enough of their humanity to change what we do next.

The officer’s empathy lasted only a few minutes.

My mother’s lasted much longer.

Once I was sent to MacDougall, Mom came to see me on Sundays.

She had every reason to be angry, exhausted, disappointed, and heartbroken. I had lied to her. I had frightened her. I had run. I had stolen. I had put her through things no mother should have to carry.

But she came.

Sunday after Sunday, she came.

There is a kind of love that does not make excuses for you but refuses to abandon you.

That was Mom.

She could not unlock the prison door.

She could not serve the sentence for me.

She could not undo my choices.

But every time she arrived, her presence told me something the prison could not:

You are still my son.

The state had a number for me.

The court had a charge for me.

The prison had a bunk for me.

My mother still had my name.

And somewhere inside that prison, I began writing.

Other inmates would bring me pieces of their lives—things they wanted to say to their girlfriends, wives, mothers, grandmothers, and families. They trusted me to find words for feelings they could not express.

Even there, in a place built around guilt and punishment, men still missed people.

They still loved.

They still grieved.

They still wanted to be understood.

They were more than the worst things they had done too.

I had a small-bodied Yamaha acoustic guitar, and that guitar gave my mind somewhere to go.

Then the words came:

I remember my childhood days

Seems so long ago

Running by the river streams

Singing all those childhood songs

What I remember most of all

Is how my mama

Would come running when I’d fall

Pick me up and brush me off

And hold me in her arms

At seventeen, childhood should not have felt so far away.

But mine did.

“Childhood Days” was the first song I wrote.

And I wrote it in prison.

The song was not claiming I had done nothing wrong.

It was remembering that wrongdoing was not where my life began.

Before I became an inmate, I had been a child.

Before the cell door, there had been my mother’s arms.

Before fear became the loudest voice in my life, there had been love.

That song did for me what empathy asks us to do for one another.

It remembered the person beneath the label.

The officer saw the frightened boy.

My mother kept loving the boy.

And the song remembered the boy.

Years later, I have had to learn how to see him too.

For a long time, I looked back and asked, “What was wrong with me?”

That question left room for only condemnation.

Eventually, I learned to ask another question:

“What happened to me?”

That question did not make me innocent.

It made me understandable.

And once I became understandable, I could begin taking responsibility in a different way—not as a bad seed doomed to remain bad, but as a wounded person responsible for learning how not to keep wounding others.

That is what empathy can make possible.

Not avoidance.

Not denial.

Not permission to cause harm.

Understanding.

Accountability.

And the belief that no human being should be reduced to the worst thing we know about them.

So when I hear Christians treating empathy as though it is spiritually dangerous, I think about that officer.

I think about Mom coming on Sundays.

I think about Jesus seeing people whom religious society had already named and dismissed.

And I think about a frightened seventeen-year-old writing “Childhood Days” inside prison because some part of him still remembered what it felt like to be held.

Empathy is not the enemy of truth.

Empathy is what keeps truth from becoming cruelty.

It allows us to say:

What you did matters.

What happened to you matters too.

You are responsible.

And you are still human.

The door may still have to close.

But before it does, there can be a voice that says, “Do not harm him.”

There can be a mother who keeps coming.

There can be a song that remembers your name.

There can be mercy in a place that was not built for mercy.

And sometimes that small act of being seen is enough to remind a frightened person that guilt may be part of his story, but it does not have to be the end of it.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this has been Audio Story Time.

You can hear “Childhood Days” and learn more about the music and my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, at toddmayson.com.

Thank you for listening.