Post this at all the
intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue,
and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from
human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In
simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a
salvation-garden of your life.
James
1:19-21, The Message.
I use a quote from Stephen Covey a lot:
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they
listen with the intent to reply.”
We all regularly encounter those who start sentences with something
like “I don’t understand” but then complete what began as a quest for
understanding with why what they don’t understand is clearly wrong, stupid, or
something they strongly disagree with.
This is basic human
nature: it is part of the human condition.
My reaction when this happens is to think “you must think you
understand enough about this to say you don’t like it.” I hear the religious authorities of Jesus day
saying to “I don’t understand this Jesus dude, and I don’t like him.”
I confess I find this type of conversation jarring. I operate in the faith that
optimism, enthusiasm, and hope are contagious.
May I invite all of us to lead with our ears and follow with our
tongues?
May I invite everyone to replace replace negativity with the "help me
understand.”
Bonhoeffer nails it (as
he usually does): "The first service one owes to others in a
community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins
with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for others is learning
to listen to them."
He also writes:
"There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to
know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive
listening, that .... is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of
the other person." It almost sounds like the Covey above! Maybe I need to change who I am quoting from Covey to Bonhoeffer?
Rise above basic human
nature: listening is not part of the human condition.
In the 1951, John Huston movie “The African Queen” the character played
by Humphrey Bogart laments that how he behaves is “only human nature” to which
the Katherine Hepburn character answers:
“Nature … is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
We are Easter people.
Let us endeavor to spread the joy of the empty tomb in all that we
do.
John Wesley wrote: “I have often repented of
judging too severely, but very seldom of being too merciful.”
It
can be argued that judging too quickly is a form of judging too severely.
Perhaps
in seeking understanding, we might reduce the need to request mercy later.
Selah, Dennis
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