A Ramble About Listening

Listening to what someone has to say is a complicated prospect at best. It involves not only allowing the words from the person to travel and enter your ear canals, but also involves giving the person your complete attention. Listening to a person involves not only your ears, but your eyes as well as you watch their body language and posture. It involves more than just processing the sounds and syllables that person's mouth and voicebox make into meaningful symbols of thought, but also involves listening for the tone and mood of the speaker. This is why women tend to be better at it than men do, because they pay attention to all of these things instinctively, rather than just focusing on the words being said. Men tend to be pretty myopic.



Listening to God is a similarly complicated prospect. I was watching "Evan Almighty" the other day, and this one part stuck out to me. When the main bad guy Congressman addresses Evan and asks, "You talk to God? ... And He talks back?" As though this was certainty of Evan's insanity. Often the idea of God speaking to us is considered akin to hearing disembodied voices in our heads telling us to do harmful things. The other reaction is almost as equally harmful, when people start mobbing the person to whom God is speaking.



The truth is that God generally isn't as silent as we think He is. He is different. He is other. And learning to listen to Him involves many of the same elements as learning to listen to anyone else. The first and most important thing is to pay attention to Him. Give Him your complete attention. Not to your perception of what you think He is like, but to pay attention to Him as He is; completely other from us. He is everywhere there is a "where" simultaneously, knows you better than you do, and is not bound by time and space. This is the hardest thing for us to do, even with human conversation. It is harder still when attempting to listen to someone who is outside of our human senses.



The second thing to consider, is that while He may give you a heads up that something might happen involving you soon, He is rarely specific about what that might be. I think I've come to understand that this is for our own good. If we knew specifics beforehand, we might do something stupid and change the desired outcome. He often tells us, "just trust Me," for this reason. Another reason for it is that the specifics are so over our heads it would be a waste of time for Him to sit down and try to explain it to us. He's always got our best interests in mind and He asks us to believe that. When God speaks to us, it has very little to do with future events and a whole lot more to do with what's happening right here and right now. Asking Him about future events, unless He has a purpose in mind for telling you, is pointless. If it is counterproductive for His goals for you to tell you something, He will remain silent and say "just trust Me."



The third thing to consider is that He will always speak to you in a way that you can understand (assuming that you are paying attention to Him in the first place). He's not going to use signs and symbols (which are the basis of any language, verbal or visual) which are meaningless to you.



The fourth thing to consider is that He often wants to talk about things that we don't want to talk about. In my most productive prayer times, most of the "conversation" centers around things in my life which I haven't dealt with yet. It usually involves me stripping away the comfortable illusions I surround myself with and approaching Him "naked" and for that reason, it terrifies me to go there at times. He doesn't do this to be harsh, He just has different goals in mind for me than I do at times and He wants me to meet those goals even when I would rather talk about other things: ANY other things.



When we approach God, we need to ask ourselves "why are we approaching Him?" We need to examine ourselves and determine if what we want to talk about has to do with our own self-destructive desires. If what we are asking Him is clearly counter to His goals for us, we need to reconsider.



Finally, in order to really listen to Him, we have to silence ourselves. It is impossible to have a conversation with someone when you won't let them talk, and end up answering your own questions by making assumptions based on your understanding of things. In this kind of a scenario, in order to tell you anything really important, the other person would have to slap you to get your attention. Sometimes God does the equivalent of slapping us hard when we won't shut up long enough to listen to Him. He knows I've taken a few good hits with a 2x4 before I've paid attention.



Truth is, God speaks to us all the time. It's not unusual. It's certainly not proof of insanity to recognize it. It's our natural spiritual autism that keeps us from being able to hear Him. It takes a lot of effort on our part to be able to recognize and acknowledge Him when He does. It probably takes double that for Him to finally get a message across to us.