Listen – Sunday, February 08, 1981
Ours is an age of communication. Telephone wires hum with millions of voices. Satellites soar through the sky reflecting words and pictures to the waiting radio speakers and television screens. Mailbags bulge with correspondence and the ceaseless drone of human voices fills the air over every city of any size.
The effective persuader is a powerful person in today’s society and communication is preached as a panacea for many of our problems; so, we are encouraged to improve our abilities to get our point across, and effectively state and support our position.
It is good that we be able to articulate our views, but there is another communication skill that is equally valuable and vital to the world’s well-being, and which may be lost in the babble of voices begging to be heard. This is the quiet and priceless art of listening.
The listening we are accustomed to today is often a faint shadow of the real thing.
Bombarded, as we are each day with hundreds of messages, we have learned to turn a semi-deaf ear to much of what we hear.
Effective listening, of course, is more than just being quiet. Done well it is an active and demanding mental and spiritual labor. To listen well demands our full attention; not only to the words, but to the inflections, expressions, body movements, the things left unsaid and any other signals the person may be sending out.
Effective listening requires empathy; the ability to put ourselves in the position of those who are speaking to us, to feel as they feel.
Good listening demands understanding of others, their desires, their hopes, fears and problems. We are always so quick to judge, and so slow to understand.
Real listening would work miracles in this troubled world. If parents listened more to children, children to parents; if the troubled and forlorn among us could find a sympathetic ear; if nations would stop hollering and threatening and listen to the heartfelt yearnings of each other’s people, how different this world might be.
Perhaps in nothing do we need to learn to listen more than in our prayers. We cry unto the Lord and then we cut of the communication assuming that the prayer is over. But it may only have just begun.
The ancient king of Israel, David sang out such a prayer. He piled praise on praise and sang unto the Lord until a voice came to his heart and said, “Be still and know that I am God.”1 That is good counsel yet.
Those who listen well will hear this comforting assurance and know that He is always there and always watching over us.
1 Old Testament, Psalm 46:10
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February 08, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,686