I was chatting today with two men in the fire and emergency services setting I work in, and the three of us were lamenting, yet also laughing, about how few people are listeners. “I listen but then sometimes open up, and the other person so often then rattles on about something completely different, as if they’ve not even listened. I know I’m a boring talker but come on ha-ha.”
A lot of what we talk about humorously is astonishingly serious. This conversation was just that. We laughed but equally we were astounded by how little most people listen.
Part of the issue in this day is the stress everyone’s under; the past two years have been a game changer in everyone’s estimation of life. Anxiety, exhaustion, elevated ambient of stress, more cynicism, less belief in leaders’ integrity, less faith in innate goodness of people, more mistrust and distrust, and a whole lot more confusion and overwhelm in society generally.
People have less range and less space these days. It seems. Yet, flipping the seeming reality on its head, as in what the Kingdom of Heaven does, we can find in our imaginative exploration of things the idea that always works, eternally I mean.
The more we give away of what we cannot keep the more we will retain of what we cannot lose.
So we give up the right of being understood and all the more do we free up space to understand.
As we give up on the expectation that someone will love us, and exist simply to love, we’re granted freedom from bondage—nobody will ever love us as perfectly as we need.
As we worry less about the despair that consumes our focus in anxiety, we find we can just as much procure hope with our imagination; a hope that gradually becomes our living situations.
And it’s the same with being heard. If we instead become the willing listener, to become enthralled about others’ stories, the weight of our own stories diminishes. This isn’t to say our stories are insignificant. The fact is others’ stories are just as significant, and the more we focus on others the bigger our perspective gets.
The more we listen into another’s struggle, the less alone we feel in our struggle.
As a speaker with others listening, we’re never appreciated like we are when we’ve helped ease a burden through the simple presence of listening.
Having listened, and having picked our moment, holding out to comment until we’ve heard all we need to, we’re then poised to affirm and encourage. Our qualification to speak life comes from our willingness to wade into the abyss that others have shared with us.
It’s one thing to shower a gift on someone, it’s an entirely different thing to BE the gift, and listeners are always a gift to those they listen to.
But if we listen, we listen objectively, with sensitivity, with an ear for what the sharer is concerned about, and we listen without judgement or condemnation or bias drowning out what they’re saying. We listen to serve the other person. Then, we bless them.
And if we listen, when someone is opening up to us, we prayerfully listen in such a way as not to harm them with a view they don’t want to hear, advice (unless they’re seeking it), or a judgement out of bias. It’s an immense thing to be trusted with someone else’s material. It’s not a trust to taken for granted. It’s a privilege to be counted trustworthy, so let’s be worthy of that trust.
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