Why Listen?

01/12/2007

He was a young man…he had just flown in on the same flight as me. I hadn’t seen him on the plane, but he was headed to the same baggage claim area as I was. He had an excited look in his eyes, probably traveling home for Christmas to be with his family. I spotted him later, standing with what looked to be his parents. He uttered a few words, then stood silent as his words fell on deaf ears. It seemed to not matter what was going on in his life as his father quickly began to tell some story that could top the one his son had began to share with the family…

Maybe I was sensitive to this scene at the airport because of the very same lessons God has been placing upon my heart…I believe so. We are quick to want to tell our story, but are we quick to want to listen to another’s?

Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters,
You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.
James 1:19 (NLT)

People want to tell their story, but not so many are willing to listen. When we do take the time to listen, there is so much to be learned about another’s heart.

On this very same flight, talked about above, I sat next to a woman who was also flying home. It was easy to see she was on a business trip because of the clothes she wore, and she was busily working on her Christmas cards. It seemed a good use of time, so after a few brief words, I left her alone and read the book I had brought along for the flight. I’m not great at starting up a conversation with someone I don’t know. I joke with those who are good at this that if they will get it started, I will be happy to take it from there. Sort of like, you go ahead and “outline” the picture, and then I’ll be happy to color it in…if that makes sense. I love talking with people, but I still have some shy bones in my body, and opening up a conversation with a stranger is one of them. I think God wants me to get over it…

An hour or so into the flight, her Christmas cards were finished, and it seemed God wanted me to talk with this woman…but how? I wanted to fall back on my old ways, and wait until she instigated the talk, but God had other plans. Being prompted by God, I believe, I laid the book down that I had been reading and grabbed my bag of pretzels to munch on. I knew I could not put on my headset and listen to music because that would certainly shut the door to any conversation between us. So I glanced around the cabin, out the windows, and waited…at one point I looked at my tray table and it was like the words leapt off the cover of my book, “You Ask.”

You see, the book I was reading was entitled, “If You Will Ask,” but because of other things laying there and the bold print in the words, “You Ask,” it seemed that that was all it said, and it certainly seemed God was asking me to get rid of that shy bone, and begin a conversation! I sort of chuckled at the directness of God and the amazing ways He will get our attention and speak to us. I also knew what I was to ask this woman about, so that wasn’t even the hard part. Since I was just returning from a wedding, and I had learned early on in the flight that this woman had also recently gotten married, what better conversation to have…what woman doesn’t want to talk about her wedding?

So, about an hour before our flight landed, I asked a simple question about her wedding, and our conversation began, and continued on until the plane landed and we exchanged business cards, and went our separate ways. I told you, the “coloring in” is the easy part for me. In that brief hour, we both met a person we had never met, we both listened to a life we had never known about, and we talked of the ways of God when His blessings seem abundant, and when life hurts beyond measure.

How was all this done?
By starting with a simple question to a stranger.
And, by not only speaking, but also by listening intently to the stories being shared.

In this world, words are important, but silence can speak in even greater degrees. We are fixers, we are movers, we are shakers, we are…busy!! But in all of that, we are missing so very much. Sometimes God calls for silence from our lips, so that He can have our hearts in an even deeper way.

These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far away.
Matthew 15:8 (NLT)

Jesus used these words out of Isaiah where it goes on to say, “And their worship of me amounts to nothing more than human laws learned by rote. Because of this, I will do wonders among these hypocrites. I will show that human wisdom is foolish and even the most brilliant people lack understanding.” (Isaiah 13b-14)

We’re so full of ourselves, we can’t possibly absorb another person and understand their heart if we won’t keep our lips quiet long enough to hear what’s inside of them. It is the same with our Lord, if our lips are always moving, if our words are too many, we won’t be quiet long enough to gain God’s wisdom along the way, we’ll only be full of our own human wisdom which is foolish. We will lack the understanding of God’s ways.

I had been out of town for a couple of weeks for a wedding, and during my trip, I met and talked with many, many people. Some were old friends, some new friends, some friends of friends, some family of friends…my mind is swirling this morning with all the conversations that were had before, during and after the big event. Being the Christmas season, there were parties to attend, Christmas programs, teas, dinners, and the grandest party of all, the wedding! Then there’s the day after the wedding, where the exhaustion sets in and more conversations are had about how it all went and how beautiful it all was. What’s that song from, “The Music Man?” “…pick a little, talk a little, pick a little talk a little…talk…talk…talk…talk…” However it goes, there’s a whole lot of talking going on surrounding a wedding.

In all of it, the great opportunity that we have is to listen. Because, believe it or not, most people aren’t really that interested in our story until they’ve emptied themselves out of their own words. Most people are looking for someone to listen to them. This is not being unkind; this is just the way we are as human beings. It is the way God designed us, and then in that design, He asks His children to get over ourselves and be His listening vessel. To get to the point in our lives where we will get over everything we think, everything we feel, everything we want to say, and in exchange focus on Him in every conversation. He wants us to desire His wisdom and His flowing of the Holy Spirit through us to those around us so that they can know Him and see Him and desire Him when all the words about everything else in their lives have been spent.

Far too many of us talk too much, and don’t listen enough. And even if we think we’re listening, we’re not—we’re just being quiet long enough to think about the next thing we want to say as soon as the person who is talking comes up for air. We love to talk!! But, we gotta love to listen more, because in that there are great riches of understanding that God wants us to get. Great riches that the enemy would have us miss out on when we are so totally absorbed in our own lives. The people around us are amazing and they all have a story to tell—they all have something on their heart that they need to share, and God wants us to hear it so that they can know of His great love in the midst of it.

You see, underneath it all, all the garbage in our world, all the hurt, all the catastrophes, all the blessings, all the truths and all the lies, all the comings and goings, all the jobs and lost jobs and new jobs, all the teenage headaches and all the sleepless nights, there is a hunger for God in people’s hearts, and we can miss it. People hunger for God’s Love, and we don’t want to miss the opportunity to share His love with them by busily talking over it.

God created us to be loved, and then to love. We cannot love another if we don’t know God’s love. It says in 1 John 4:19, “We love each other because he first loved us.” Pretty selfish, don’t you think? But that’s the way God designed us. He wanted us to discover His love and all that He was offering to us through His Son, Jesus Christ, so He put a yearning into our hearts for love, and we search our whole lives for it until we find Him. We search for it in our parents, in our children, in our spouses, in our friends…and we find snippets of it here and there, but we cannot know the complete, all-consuming, all-giving, unconditional love we long for in anything but our God. And when we do find it in Him, only then are we really ready to start giving His love, not ours, to those around us.

That’s where the fun really begins!!
That’s where the party starts!
That’s where the Wonderful Life really is!

I met and talked with so many awesome people during my time away. That is not to say those that are close to me here at home are anything to be sneezed at, it’s just that this was an opportunity to be in many different situations with many different people—some I knew well, some I didn’t know at all—and listen to their hearts. To stop moving my lips, and honor them with my heart, and it was challenging as God stretched me further and further in this area. You know I love to tell a story, as I am doing here, so being quiet is no easier for me than it is for anyone else. I’ve got lots to share, but God is teaching me there are greater things learned in silence—until He asks me to speak—so my desire is to know Him more through listening to Him and to others.

The last two weeks I have been reading Matthew 15:21-28 over and over, but even going further back in Matthew 15 to verse ten, it says, “Jesus called the crowd to him and said, ‘Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.’” He said that, “…the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart…”

God wants our heart. He wants what comes out of it to be pure. He wants our focus to be on Him at all times, in every conversation, whether talking or listening.

In traveling to the airport to come home, there was a song on the radio that I had never heard before. It said something like, “I’m giving up myself. Telling myself good-bye.” We don’t want to do that because we’re so full of ourselves. We think what we have to say is the most interesting thing of all, and we just gotta let others know how great it is! And it probably is!! But, is anyone really listening until they have enough space inside to absorb it? If we really want to share our lives with someone else, and most importantly to share our God with someone else, we have to listen to their stories first—it’s just the way we’re wired. Most of the time we’re too full of all the busyness in our own lives to absorb anything else.

Look at our relationship with our Lord. When we come to Him in prayer, we’re usually so full of the things that are happening in our lives that we’ll start by pouring out our hearts—we usually tell Him about our present situation and our needs first, and then if we remember, begin to thank Him for how great He is and all the wonderful things He’s done. We want Him to hear our story first, and sadly, we sometimes then run off before we’ve even given Him a chance to speak, to tell us what He’s doing, how He’s working in our lives, all that He would like us to know about His love for us and care for us…much of the time we don’t even stop long enough to open up His Word and read about His stories, His people, their experiences and all that they learned. We have our own stories, so we’re quite full enough, thank you very much. But then…we leave our time together empty of the fullness of His love. We leave, still full of ourselves, and what we think, and what we feel, and we’ve honored Him with our lips but not our hearts.

Jesus didn’t always speak. Many times He asked questions of those around Him, wanting to know what they thought, who they thought He was, what they thought should be done:

Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he asked them, “Why do you have such evil thoughts in your hearts? Matthew 9:4 (NLT)

Jesus asked them, “Do you believe I can make you see?” Matthew 9:28 (NLT)

"Have you understood all these things?" Jesus asked. Matthew 13:51 (NIV)

"How many loaves do you have?" Jesus asked. Matthew 15:34 (NLT)

Jesus asked him, “What do you think, Peter? Do kings tax their own people or the people they have conquered? ” Matthew 17:25 (NLT)

Jesus stopped and called them. "What do you want me to do for you?" he asked. Matthew 20:32 (NLT)

“When the owner of the vineyard returns,” Jesus asked, “what do you think he will do to those farmers?” Matthew 21:40 (NLT)

And sometimes, Jesus is simply silent in the beginning, even when He has the answer, like in this piece of Scripture when the Canaanite woman came to Him for a solution to the problem with her daughter:

Jesus did not answer a word.
Matthew 15:23 (NIV)

How freeing is that? When we think we have to have all the answers, or even when we do have them, we can still be silent and wait on God and His timing to speak. We don’t have to be clever, or fix anything; we can simply listen to another’s heart without the responsibility of having to be “god” to them. If we listen, and then there is something we need to say, the Holy Spirit within will take care of the words we need to speak.

We can’t hear God, if we won’t listen.
We can’t know our Lord’s heart if we aren’t quiet long enough to hear Him.
We can’t know our “neighbor” if we won’t ask the questions, and then stop our minds and our lips from moving while they answer.

I learned many things about the woman I met on the plane. I learned of her wedding and about the wonderful man she married and the men she left behind who weren’t for her. I learned how she loved her cat, and how it died, and the same day she went and bought two kittens wondering if she could love them when her heart was so broken, but she did. I learned things about her work, her friends, about her mom who died after a difficult battle with cancer. And in the last moments of our conversation, I learned what was weighing heaviest on her heart when all else was said and done—her heart was hurting because of an estranged relationship with a good friend. She had been given a chance to empty out all the stuff piled on top of that, and she got to the root of her life on this day and perhaps she felt better just being able to share that with someone, even a stranger on a plane. Perhaps by being quiet, by asking a question, God was able to touch her heart in ways that I will never know about until we meet again in Heaven. We can’t always see what God is doing, but we can be a vessel He can use if we will “give up ourselves, and tell ourselves goodbye.”

Our desire, as Christians, is to share the Good News with those we meet, and especially with our family and friends, but how do we do that? What’s God’s design in that? I think we get it backwards most times. We want to come in with both barrels loaded, ready to fire at any chink in the armor, proving a need for the God we know…but is that God’s way? I believe God’s way is one of building a relationship with everyone we meet, for however brief of a time we might have with them.

Oswald Chambers says, “There must be a sense of need before your message is of any use.” He says, “Begin to get at people where they are until you get them to realize what they lack, and then erect the standard of Jesus Christ for their lives.” (My Utmost For His Highest – December 19th)

One day awhile back, I was talking with one of my brothers. He was in a confused state, things weren’t going well in his life and he really didn’t know what the problem was. He was searching for the answer, but it seemed it was hidden somewhere—so God brought us together to talk on the phone. I went into my bedroom here in the RV, and lay down on the bed to listen to my brother. He told me of “things” he was dealing with, of the “wrongs” that were happening, etc…and I listened, and listened, interjecting little. At one point, Jim looked in to see if I was still on the phone because he hadn’t heard anything for so long—he saw I was, and he knew I was just listening… After what was probably an hour and a half, it seemed God was prompting me to say something, so I asked my brother to listen to me. He said he would, so I began to speak, but he interjected. I asked him again to listen, once again he agreed, then felt the need to interject something…so I asked him again to just listen for a minute. He was quiet then, and God began to use me as a vessel to get a message to my brother that he needed to hear, one that would set him free from the confused state he was in. It was the most miraculous thing! We were both in awe when God was done. With just a few words spoken to a heart that had been listened to, there was a filling up of the Truth of God that made things clear to him once again. His confused state was gone!

My brother was reacting to things in his life, as the enemy would have liked him to. The enemy was in there trying to wreck relationships, and so many times we fall prey to his tactics. As is written in, “If You Will Ask,” “If we allow a reaction not born of a relationship to Jesus Christ, we shall have much wilderness waste to get through before we can come to God. Mists and shadows come between our conscious life and the interceding Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is there all the time, but we have lost sight of Him.”

As servants of God, we are here as the body of Christ. We are here to help one another, and to encourage one another. We can’t do that if we won’t take the time to listen to each other—and if someone has lost their way in the wilderness, we need to allow the Holy Spirit to use us as a beacon light through the “mists and shadows.” If we’re so busy being our own lighthouse, bellowing out with our loud foghorn, we will only end up steering people away from us and the close relationships God desires us to have through the empowering Holy Spirit that lives inside each one of us who believes.

There are great blessings in the stories we will hear in the listening, as I found out in another conversation with a friend just a few days ago. Seated at a table in a restaurant with a large group of friends, we got to talking about the things of God. This friend told me of an experience he had had in church recently with a woman he believes God seated him next to. He doesn’t like to sit down front—he attends a Catholic church and there are no kneeling pews on the front row. But God had other plans, and that was the only available seat, so he took it. The woman sitting next to him participated in all the activities except for the taking of communion. She sat alone when everyone else went forward, and the tears ran down her face. When my friend returned to his seat, he said God was asking him to ask her, “Why didn’t you take communion?” He didn’t want to ask her. What an uncomfortable, personal question to ask this stranger, but once again God prompted him…once again he argued with God. The third time God prompted him, he complied and asked the woman the question. She answered quickly, without hesitation, seemingly waiting for the question to be asked although the answer was an uncomfortable thing to admit to anyone. Once revealed to the person who would ask her, I believe God’s plan was to set her free from the reason she felt she was unworthy to receive communion. Through my friend’s obedience, I believe God wanted this woman to be unchained from the “teachings (that) are but rules taught by men.” (Matthew 15:9) Through his listening to her story, God was working on restoring her to Him. Listening can be the most powerful thing God asks us to do when it is of Him.

I was blessed by listening to this story too, as my friend was blessed by listening and obeying God in church on that day, and this woman’s life and walk with God will be forever blessed and changed because she was asked a question by a stranger one day—a stranger willing to listen to her heart.

You may ask, “If everybody is listening, who’s going to do the talking?”
Good question, but one that’s easily answered.
Everybody else will do the talking!!

You see, our only concern is that we listen when we are called to—being the one who is listening to our mighty God at all times, and knowing God’s love so deeply that we are able to be used as the vessel of compassion and love that He designed us to be. When we spend time in prayer, we spend time with the Greatest Listener known to man—He is our Perfect Example. Our Lord is always available, always focused on what we are saying, not hurrying on His way, not busy with making or planning or doing anything! He is there, 24-7, for us!! Halleluiah! For one whose love language is quality time, I deeply appreciate that! (There is a book about love languages, in case you weren’t aware.)

We are a selfish, self-absorbed people, and God knows that. He’s trying to teach us to give that up and to offer His love to those we come into contact with—but we get tongue tied in the process by talking too much. Perhaps it’s because we think the love we are offering to others comes from us, but it does not, it comes from God. Alone, we are not capable, but in knowing our Lord, we simply become the vessel that His love is passed through. We have no ability on our own to love as we should, or even to listen as we should, or to act as we should. When we listen and then pass His message of love onto another, it is because God loves them so much that He prompts us to act on His behalf, to be Him to them. This makes our “job” easier. We are not responsible to try and convince others of anything—our responsibility lies in resting in God, of knowing His love, of listening to Him, and then letting His love flow through us to them. It is not out of our kind heart, it is out of a heart that is open to what God asks because of how much He loves!

On my last day of this trip, I was packing my things to come home. During the packing process, God prompted my heart and asked me to give a young woman who I had spent time with my favorite cross necklace. I was sure I had “heard” wrong! I started to think about the necklaces I had brought with me, and I thought maybe I could give her a different one, one that didn’t mean so much to me…or maybe I hadn’t really heard God at all? God then prompted me to just go take a look through my jewelry bag, so I thought I should at least do that. I opened it up and quickly rummaged through everything I had brought, but I didn’t even see the cross necklace He “spoke” of, so I tied up the bag figuring I hadn’t heard God correctly—but when I went to reposition the jewelry bag again in my suitcase, I saw the cross necklace lying there outside of the bag…I laughed. It was as if God said, “Here, I’ll get it out for you.” I knew what I must do, and I prayed for God’s direction in “delivering” this gift. I stuck it into my pocket and waited to see what this last day held.

Of course, it held a picnic lunch on the beach that included this young woman. Laughter and stories were shared until the time came when I was telling my own story, and I felt the prompting of God to tell of how God wanted me to give “A” this necklace. There were sort of bewildered looks from those I was with, including “A,” and then I dug into my pocket and gave her the necklace. She thanked me, and put it on…

Now, I can’t know what this meant to her, I can’t know God’s thoughts in this, I can’t know so many things about this, I can only know that we are to hear His gentle voice, to listen to it, to understand what He is saying and be obedient in that. The rest is up to Him.

In thinking about the necklace on the way home, I had to laugh. God knew the day I picked it out, that it wasn’t for me, not permanently anyway. He had “A” in mind from the very beginning, and He knew the day I would pass it along! There’s such a joy in knowing that…such a pleasure in how much He loves each and everyone of us so intimately and has things in the works before we even know what we might be needing on any given day! For some reason, one that only God knows, on this day “A” needed to feel the love of God in her life with this gift from Him. She needed to know God was thinking about her. And really, who doesn’t need that kind of personal “touch” from God?

God Bless you “A.” I hope you enjoy what God had given me, and maybe even one day He will ask you to pass it on to someone else who might need a touch of His personal love in his or her life!

I’m not the best listener, but there’s joy in the journey of learning how to be more Christ-like in that way. There are blessings that we don’t want to miss, by being a good listener. Little by little, God will show us how to listen to those around us, if we will start by listening to Him—by honoring Him with not only our lips, but with our hearts.

Then Jesus called to the crowd to come and hear.
“All of you listen,” he said, “and try to understand.”
Mark 7:14 (NLT)

Learning to listen,

Diane