“This month, Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday,” my husband, Jerry will say while mischievously cutting his eyes at me. I think most of the time he says things like that to make me smile, but sometimes I wonder if he might be checking to see if I’m really listening.
Listening: 1. “To give attention with the ear; attend closely for the purpose of hearing; give ear.” Dictionary.com
We all are experts at it, right? We have two ears, correct? What more could anyone want? But I submit to you that instead of being fully engaged in the moment, we are far more practiced in looking attentive when in fact we are light years away.
Henry, my grandson who is two and a half years old has started the tried and true “staring past you while not paying a lick of attention to you” glazed gaze. He’s also mastered the “nodding the head and smiling while not hearing one word” look. Just yesterday, he discovered the buffet where I keep special china. As I tried to catch his exploring fingers from picking up one heirloom after another, and as I verbally tried to grab his attention, he tried to divert mine with the cutest expression of “What? I’m not doing anything wrong.” Truly he’s not, he doesn’t know better, because he’s two. But what about myself?
Margaret D. Mitchell, the author of a weekly devotion I love to read, God’s Love At Work, (godsloveatwork.com) says, not word for word, that when she recognizes something wrong in someone else’s life she goes ahead and confesses it as if she had done it. What she so easily sees in someone else, she knows all too well; it is merely the reflection of her own heart. So when I see the mastered techniques of not listening in anyone, it’s because it’s the mirror image of me.
We all do it. We all give the performance of a lifetime when we seemingly are able to split ourselves in two, to be paying close attention to someone, but in reality, in another corner of our minds, are thinking on the grocery list of yesterday and the to do list of tomorrow. When that happens with myself, I can’t help but wonder in those half listened moments, in the giving of myself in bits and pieces only, if in my mental multi tasking, I am missing out.
As I truly begin to examine myself, or rather it’s God-inspired conviction, it’s eye opening, shocking really because I’m beginning to see to how selfish I am with everything, even down to listening with my whole heart.
But there’s always good news. Jesus says he came to heal the sick, not those who are well. So I think it’s a good beginning then to realize how lacking I am, to scratch the surface and begin to see how deep my ailment runs.
Opening my heart rather than my ears to let God change me and to remember to love the Lord God and others more than myself is paramount. For if by the grace of God I do that, then truly listening is truly loving.
“‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?’ And he said to him,’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’” -Matthew 22:36-40 (NLT)
