Posts Tagged: listening

“2022: The Year of Listening”

On January 2, 2022 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

Because of the encouragement of Jon Gordon, I have been taking a word or a short phrase as my mantra or focus for the year. For 2022, the word is “Listening”. This year I am listening.

Initially, I was planning to make “Talking Less” my focus. However, it occurred to me that this was a “not-goal”—and not-goals are not good. So, I decided on listening.

This listening will have several aspects. Here are a few that I have identified:

  1. Listening to God.
  2. Listening to Myself.
  3. Listening to Others.

I’m sure that there are other schematic ways of breaking this down, but this seems to me to be a good way to try to wrap my mind around what I am trying to be and become this year. Not all my blog posts will deal with listening, but probably several will. As readers of this blog, you have the right to ask me how the listening is going. Questions, discussion, and your own insights are, of course, most welcome. I will try to listen!

I have no illusion that this is going to be an easy mantra. I’ve never been as good at listening as I have been at talking. Still, hard things are often precisely where the growth is. I hope to grow in my ability to listen this year.

Andy Stanley has a wonderful sermon in which he challenges us to “be quick to listen, slow to speak.” As he admits, he stole these words from James (James 1:19). Unfortunately, I have too often turned around James’ (and Stanley’s) admonition. I’ve been a machine gun when it comes to speaking and refrigerated molasses when it comes to listening. It’s high time I became a biblical listener.

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“PROBLEM SOLVING 101”

On October 23, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

I was trying to open a door, and was having no success at all.  A passerby stopped to help.  “Try pulling it to you instead of pushing,” he said.  The door opened easily.  The Good Samaritan couldn’t resist a parting shot: “It helps if you read!”

Sure enough, in big, bold, black letters, right at my eye level, was the single word

PULL

Ironically, I had just found out that I had been admitted to the Ph.D. program at St. John’s College, Nottingham.  I was thinking (as I was trying to open the door) about all the reading I needed to do over the next several years.

Paying attention to the here and now is easy to say.  Pulling it off is another matter.  And yet, problem-solving may be largely a matter of paying attention to what’s in front of us when it is in front of us.

Problem-solving is also a matter of listening to the wisdom and common sense of other people.  Take my coffee cup, for example.  A year-and-a-half ago, a cousin by marriage served me a cup of coffee in a mug that was the size of a Sherman tank.  I’ve been drinking my coffee and tea in it ever since.  Partly, this is because Pam is a very nice lady whom I like a lot.  Mostly, it is because I am lazy.  Why should I waste my time drinking two cups of coffee, when I can drink one?

However, the coffee gets cold before I can finish it, so I have to warm it up one or more times.  My wife has pointed out several times that perhaps I should just drink my coffee from a smaller cup.  Today, I had a blinding flash of the obvious: She’s right!  I drank my coffee from a smaller cup, and sure enough, I didn’t have to warm it up—even once!

Sometimes, I also have a rather obvious insight about God and people.  Not often, just sometimes.  Here’s one from today.

A friend of mine and I call and chat on the phone almost every day.  We also pray for one another over the phone.  He is Jewish and I am Christian.  He is one of the most Christian Jews that I know, and I am probably one of the most Jewish Christians he knows.  This morning I prayed for my friend over the phone as follows: “God, I really cherish this dear friend, and look forward to enjoying his friendship forever.  If he’s not in Heaven, God, I’m going to be really ticked off with you, and you don’t want me to be ticked off with you!”  I do talk to God like that.  I’m not prim and proper.  I’m real.

After the amen, and after I hung up, I felt God gently (and not without a touch of humor) saying to me, “You know, I love your friend even more than you do.”  I sent my friend a text to that effect.  He texted me back the following: “Thanks!  He said the same to me about you.”

God loves all of us more than any of us loves any of us.  And that, dear reader, that realization should solve a lot of problems!

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“WHAT WE LISTEN TO”

On June 14, 2017 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“Oh be careful little ears what you hear!”  (Words from a Christian song for very small children.)

  4 “Listen, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

  5 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.

  6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-6, New Living Translation.)

“So pay attention to how you hear. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given. But for those who are not listening, even what they think they understand will be taken away from them.” (Luke 8:18, New Living Translation.)

I have big ears.  I am the first to admit that.  But the size of my ears isn’t the crucial matter; what matters is how I use my big ears.

This morning, I was listening to National Public Radio’s show “Morning Edition” and a bit of NPR’s program “1A.”  There was a lot of bad news.  (I almost typed “bad noose”—a Freudian near slip, if ever there was one!)  Some of the news items involved a terrible fire in a high rise in London, a shooting of Republicans who were practicing baseball, and the questioning of Jeff Sessions, our current attorney general.

I was finishing up the dishes, as it began to rain.  I felt that gentle internal nudge, the one I’ve learned to call “God’s leading,” suggesting that I turn off the radio and listen to the rain.

And the rain was beautiful.

I am not suggesting that I or anyone else should not listen to bad, uncomfortable news, or news that contradicts our own opinions and values.  We should.  But I wonder sometimes if we listen enough to the rain, or to our significant others, or to the songs of birds.

Jesus taught that we should be careful what we listened to, as well as how we listen.  I need to (we need to) pay attention to the very process of our listening.  In the Luke 8:18 passage that I quoted as part of the lead-in to this post, the verbs for “hearing” are in the present tense.  The Greek present tense often suggests continual, repetitive action.  Learning to listen is an ongoing process.  To paraphrase an old commercial tagline for milk, “We never outgrow our need for listening.”

Despite my big ears, I am not a particularly good listener.  But I would like to become one.  To listen, to pay attention with the ears, is a wonderful gift we could give to ourselves and to one another.

Care to join me in a new organization?  Perhaps we could call it the “Everyone Attends Regularly Society” (E.A.R.S. for short.)

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“Racism, Hate and Listening”

On December 6, 2016 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

 

A friend of mine sent me the link to an op-ed his dad wrote.  Here is the link: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/12/02/just-another-stupid-kid-letter-graffiti-artist/94822904/.

You probably need to read the op-ed at the link above.  Then, the rest of this blog will make more sense.

 

Here is the e mail I sent to my friend, Will.

Dear Will,

This is an incredibly powerful piece of writing.

My fear is that we have stopped listening to one another in this country.  Perhaps we never were listening.  Perhaps listening has always been just another word for “mentally rehearsing what we already know—or think we know—while the other person is still talking.”

Please forward this e mail to your dad.  Tell him that I am trying to not just become an angry liberal, and that I will pray for him and for your entire family.  Ask him to also pray for me, that I will not become just as hateful as the “artist” who drew these symbols of hatred.  Hatred, even toward those who hate, is still hatred.  If I indulge in hate, hate wins.  Your dad is right.

Warm (and, I hope, Loving) Regards,

Tomorrow: An ancient story about a modern problem: Wages!

DTEB

 

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