I carry other people's suffering around with me and it wrecks me for days. People tell me I am too sensitive. Is something wrong with how I am wired?

“And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire. And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven,”

Nehemiah was a senior official in the Persian court, comfortable and far from home, when travellers told him Jerusalem's walls were broken down. He sat down and wept, and mourned for days. That grief is not treated as weakness or overreaction in the narrative. It is the beginning of the whole book. His sorrow moved into prayer, then into a plan, then into rebuilding, and none of it would have started without the tears.

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

Paul writes to churches worn out by conflict and effort, and his concern is not that they care too much but that they will quietly stop. Weariness in doing good is treated as an expected danger, not a character flaw. The instruction assumes a long timescale and a harvest not yet arrived. Feeling depleted is not a signal to shut down your compassion, but it is a signal to look at how you are sustaining it.