"Warning: This article may cause psychological pain by revealing that you are not a good listener. If you can't handle the truth, stop reading, cover your ears and yell, "I can't hear you!" Attentive listening should come naturally. Newborn babies easily gather and synthesize information, picking up words, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues from their parents and siblings, acquiring volumes of tacit knowledge about people and the world. But somewhere along the way, many of us lose the ability to listen to other people well. In the area of listening, we become socially challenged. Yet we are largely oblivious to our handicap. In fact, we develop sophisticated strategies to pretend that we are listening, and to convince ourselves that we are listening, when in reality we are not fully present with others nor hearing them out to the point of understanding. Are you a good listener? Type that question into a search engine, and you will find dozens of quizzes that can help you gauge your interpersonal listening skills. Take one of these quizzes if you like. But if you really want to find out what kind of listener you are, give the quiz to a person close to you - your roommate, your spouse, or one of your teenage children - and have them answer the questions on your behalf. Go ahead. I dare you. "I triple-dog-dare you." Why do we stop being good listeners? Reasons vary from one person to another. But one common cause is that, deep down, we feel that no one has ever truly listened to us. Someone very significant in our lives, perhaps a parent, was too preoccupied to listen to us, or wouldn't allow us to speak freely, or wouldn't ever validate our opinions or emotions. From that time onward, a great deal of what we do in life, and how we interact with others in one-on-one and group settings, will be motivated by an unfulfilled desire to be heard. I have a sneaking suspicion that within the church, many of these unlistened-to people gravitate toward leadership roles that involve preaching and teaching. I'm not saying that every pastor has a frustrated inner child crying out for people to listen. But no one is immune to that tendency. My unfulfilled desires to be heard always there, lurking in the shadows, impacting my work and relationships. It has taken me a long time to realize this painful truth about myself, and it is only within the last few years that I have started to understand how my childhood experiences and background (a) make it difficult for me to listen to others, and (b) make me easily hurt when people interrupt me, brush me off or otherwise refuse to hear me out. It is not uncommon for two people to leave a conversation with very different impressions. One may think, "I listened to her very patiently," while the other thinks, "He didn't hear a word I said; talking to him was like bouncing off a brick wall!" Listening doesn't mean sitting there quietly and giving the other person a chance to talk, waiting until she has finished so that you can then make all of your points and correct her wrong thinking. A poor listener may allow others to get their words out. But he maintains a stoic posture, not allowing himself to be challenged or changed by those words except in a most superficial way. That stance was described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in" Life Together": "This impatient, inattentive listening really despises the other Christian and finally is only waiting to get a chance to speak and thus to get rid of the other." Ouch. Scot McKnight said, "To love a person is to listen to them, and to let their voice speak. To listen to a person is to let that person's world into our world." Listening is much more than hearing another person out. It to share in the thoughts and feelings of another person, allowing them to penetrate your being and change you in discernible ways. In fact, I would say that listening is "the primal act of love". You have not loved a person if you have never listened to them to the point of being challenged by them and hurt by them and changed by them for the better. A parent may say to a grown child, "I've done everything for you. I've fed you, clothed you, and paid your college tuition. I've sacrificed so much out of my love for you. Why are you so ungrateful?" All that may be true. But if the child feels that she hasn't been listened to, she will feel unloved. Here is another painful quote from "Life Together" about listening to others in the Church. "The first service one owes to others in the community involves listening to them. Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them. God's love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives us God's Word, but also lends us God's ear. We do God's work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them. So often Christians, especially preachers, think that their only service is always to have to offer something when they are together with other people. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking. Many people seek a sympathetic ear and do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking even when they should be listening. But Christians who can no longer listen to one another will soon no longer be listening to God either; they will always be talking even in the presence of God. The death of the spiritual life starts here, and in the end there is nothing left but empty spiritual chatter and clerical condescension which chokes on pious words. Those who cannot listen long and patiently will always be talking past others, and finally no longer will even notice it. Those who think their time is too precious to spend listening will never really have time for God and others, but only for themselves and for their own words and plans." The greatest strength of evangelical Christianity may be its emphasis on teaching and proclamation of the word. But that strength may also be its greatest weakness. If we produce disciples who can stand up and boldly announce what they believe but give short shrift to what others think, what have we done? Created an army of clanging cymbals? Pastoral listening is not a kind of therapy in which the leader allows people to air grievances in order to feel better so that they become more teachable. It is not a technique to help us achieve some other goal. "Listening itself is the goal. " Let's put it another way. We are not trying to give people the impression that they are being heard. We are trying to give them the privilege of actually being heard, a precious gift that many rarely experience it in their families or in their churches. We don't become better listeners by forgetting about ourselves. Ironically, good listening usually requires us to pay closer attention to ourselves. It requires us to become more aware of the overt and subtle ways that we shut others down when they try to speak. These include: * Lapsing into evaluation and giving quick advice, comfort, rebuke or encouragement. (That is what Job's friends were doing.) * Coming up with theories about why people are saying something instead of asking them and taking their words seriously. * Telling people that they need to be more balanced, that they need to remember the negative things as well as the positive things or vice-versa. (None of us is in a position to judge for someone else what is balanced for them.) * Telling people that they ought to see things more objectively. (All human beings are limited and inherently subjective.) * When someone shows weakness or pain, treating it as a spirit of sinful complaining or self-pity. (Job, by the end of the book, was complaining bitterly against God. And the Bible says that in doing so, Job did not sin. God prefers honesty to play-acting and spin.) * Making dismissive comments such as, "We know that already, We learned that already, We're doing that already," and so on. Even if those things are true, it does not mean that you have a right to stop listening. * Sending inappropriate verbal and nonverbal messages while others are speaking. Showing disapproval by frowning; making light of people's stories by joking or laughing; remaining silent and stone-faced when someone expects and wants you to react; and so on. * Thinking we can learn more about what a person thinks or feels by remembering some Bible passages or verses and applying them to him or her, rather than actually listening to what the person says. * Telling someone "I hear you" or "I understand you" because you think you have experienced something similar. A good listener doesn't need lots of sympathy or empathy, especially if it's not genuine. Rather, he needs something called "interpathy", which means that he pays close attention to the differences between his own experience and the experience of the speaker. And here is one more that I have used frequently, to the chagrin of my wife and daughter: * Telling someone that you won't listen to her unless she stops being so angry, unless she stops whining and complaining and calms down and speaks to you in a more reasonable and respectful tone. In other words, I was saying: "I refuse to interact with you until you adopt the language and communication style that I deserve." Does anyone have the right to impose that requirement on another person? Not even God has claimed that right! Isn't it interesting how, when you read the Psalms, so many of these prayers are full of anger, vitriol and other unpleasant and raw emotion? Yet God heard those prayers and accepted them and sanctified them. It's not wise to hold other people to a higher standard than the one God holds them to. And please, just one more, because I can't resist. (Can't you just hear my inner child crying out to be heard?) * When someone begins to reveal sorrow and pain, quickly telling them that they need to pray and bring it to Jesus; advising them to first solve their spiritual problem before God, and then bring it up with people later. Yes, Jesus wants to bear their infirmities and carry their sorrows. But until Jesus returns, we have been appointed to be the Body of Christ in this world. We are to be his hands and feet and mouths and especially his ears. To be "in Christ," as the Apostle Paul so frequently described, is to share in the mystery of his suffering and death for the sake of all humanity. The gospel requires us to start listening, long and hard, to people's stories of sin and sorrow and pain, rather than telling them to stop whining and soldier up.
