Learning to Listen (part 1)

Oh, that I had someone to hear me!
—Job 31:35

René Descarte, the sixteenth-century philosopher, said, “I think, therefore I am.” Sarah, our granddaughter, says, “You are, therefore I talk.”

Some years ago I was sitting in our family room trying to read a Time magazine while Sarah was trying to carry on a conversation with me. To my shame I was paying little attention, responding to her comments with an occasional grunt.

Finally, in exasperation, she crawled into my lap and got in my face: “Papa,” she shouted, “are you listening to me?”

“Sarah,” I confessed, putting down my magazine, “I haven’t been listening well. Forgive me. I’ll listen to you now.”

That’s a commitment I want to keep on other occasions as well. I want to learn how to listen.
I want to listen well so that when I finish conversations others will walk away knowing there’s at least one person in this careless world who has some inkling of what they’re doing, thinking, and feeling. I want to hear the hushed undertones of their hearts. I want them to know that I care.

Listening, however, doesn’t come easy for me. I’m paid to talk—a “wordmonger,” to borrow Augustine’s apt description of a teacher. So it has come as something of a revelation to me that I can do more with my ears than I can with my mouth.

In her book Listening to Others, Joyce Huggett relates personal experiences of listening to suffering people. She said they often talk about all she’s done for them. “On many occasions,” she wrote, “I have not ‘done’ anything. I have ‘just listened.’
I quickly came to the conclusion that ‘just listening’ was indeed an effective way of helping others.”

This was the help Job’s wordy, would-be friends failed to give him. They were “miserable comforters,” he complained. “Oh, that I had someone to hear me!” (Job 16:2; 31:35).

Job’s friends weren’t listening. They didn’t hear what he had to say. In fact, he wasn’t even sure God was listening.

Job is not alone in his longing. All human beings want to be heard, and listening is one of the best ways in the world to love them. Listening says, “You matter to me; I want to be a friend.”

Kenneth Grahame’s Badger in The Wind in the Willows knew exactly how to do this: “He sat in his arm-chair at the head of the table, and nodded gravely at intervals as the animals told their story; and he did not seem surprised or shocked at anything, and he never said, ‘I told you so,’ or, ‘Just what I always said,’ or remarked that they ought to have done so-and-so, or ought not to have done something else. The Mole began to feel very friendly towards him.”

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 4950l. All rights reserved.