LISTENING

I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't listen very well. I have this ability to turn off the sound. Not all the time, mind you, but often enough I am deaf to what others are saying, especially what my wife is saying. It's not that I've heard it all before or I think my wife has nothing to say. (I may be dense, but I am not that foolish!) It's not that I think what another has to say is not worth listening to. It is simply that sometimes I shut off the sound and retreat into my own little world.

Then there are the times when I am listening with only one ear as it were. I hear what is being said, hear the words, the sounds, but I am not really listening. The words seem to go in one ear and out the other. My thoughts at that moment are, for some reason, somewhere else. I also do this with my wife. As you might suspect, I am often in deep trouble with my wife.

Listening is an art. It does not come naturally, at least not to me. I think we have to learn how to listen. That is not to say that there is some trick to it. Rather, we must be prepared to listen. There are those who say they can listen to someone while doing something else. I'm not sure I believe that because I know I cannot. I've tried it often enough - with my wife, of course – to know that I am an abject failure. When it comes to listening, I can’t multi-task.

There are a couple of reasons why we need to listen to others. The first reason is common courtesy. When others speak to us, we need to give them our full attention. Even if we think the other person has nothing to tell us, we need to listen. The truth is, as we have all discovered, is that we have learned more from some of the unlikeliest people than we have from those we considered founts of wisdom.

Another reason to listen is that the person talking to us has a need to talk to us. Why they have that need is sometimes not obvious. We may simply be the closest ear. But they have that need and we need to be open to them. There are many times when I have simply been the ear. Complaints were being aired because they needed to be aired. The one complaining did not expect me to resolve the issue. He or she simply needed a sounding board.

Another reason we need to listen (or learn how to listen better) and that is that a universal truth holds for all of us: we do not have all the answers. No one does. We do not know all that we need to know. And because experience is a universal teacher, the lessons others learn can be helpful to us, if we would only listen. We can always learn something, often, again, from those we least expect.  I wonder how much knowledge I have missed obtaining because I was not listening.

Maybe I am an exception. Maybe most people are good listeners. Maybe I simply needed to remind myself that if I am to truly live out my faith, if I want to be the person God wants me to be and who I want to be, I have to be able to listen to others who may be speaking God's word to me.