Listening

     I recently read a quote, which said, "If you don't understand my silence, then you don't deserve my words." I reacted by feeling the quote was unfair, selfish, and perhaps unrealistic. But it stuck with me. As I chewed on these words over the next few weeks, a small kernel of truth emerged in my mind - we aren't truly listening to a person's heart if we don't hear the words they're not saying. How many of us are actually "quick to listen"? I mean, we try not to interrupt our friends. We hopefully process the words they are saying. But do we truly listen to understand, or do we listen to respond? Often, it isn't done out of intentional self-absorption, but simply a forgetfulness of others and a distracted inattention to their needs.
      People often think they know who I am when they really know nothing about me at all. They think they have me pegged. But they see only the tip of the iceberg of who I am when they assume that the things I do reflect my character. How I wish that people could see who I really am, but I really don't know how to explain to them. As a younger teen, I passively allowed the well-meaning people in my life instruct, and I didn't care that they didn't know a thing about me.
In fact, I'm completely different than I may appear on the surface - not because I'm insincere, but because my story and my heart are so big and heavy that I can't drag them out when people are buzzing around from place to place without a moment to stop. And I don't blame those people - you can't hear the silences of every person. But from these personal experiences, I've learned that if you don't have the time to truly know a person with your full attention and energy, you have to accept that, as John Green says, "Just remember that, sometimes the way you think about a person, isn't the way they actually are."
     In my own life, I truly value the people who care deeply enough about me to hear my silences. As a personality style, I have a primary cognitive function of "introverted feeling." That's a fancy way of saying that, like Mary in the Bible, who "treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart," I have a deep well of feeling that stirs beneath the surface. I take things in and ponder them, and I am not a person who naturally and immediately reacts outwardly. Other personality types might extrovert their feelings. That means that it isn't easy for me to tell people what's on my mind, because it's stuck down there inside. That's why I write. It takes time and much thought to extract those deepest parts of myself.

     This summer, I worked as an intern in my church's youth program. Part of my job was taking girls out and doing mentorship. The one piece of instruction I was given as I prepared to do this was this: "If you have an hour, spend 55 minutes listening, and spend the last 5 minutes laying out gospel-filled truth - this is how you show them Christ."
     And so I posit that with fewer words, perhaps we will all hear and be heard more often.

Three Years Without Michelle - A Flawed Perspective

Michelle had a tick that gave her a half smile as she spoke to you. She was more comical than glamorous, and for much of her life, she was a tomboy. She had dreams of becoming a doctor, but she honestly wasn't all that bright. She asked for help when she needed it, and she was either unaware or just didn't care when she stepped on toes. Michelle loved Taylor Swift and coffee. She constantly teased me, with a twinkle of amusement in her eye. She was frank, and her voice had this matter-of-fact quality that made her plain-old funny. She was quietly compassionate and patient, but she never acted like a saint about it, which I think made her more selfless than I am. It is only after deep reflection and perspective that I even realize her patience with me was rooted in a deep and love and compassion for me. She never asked for thanks or attention. Michelle was a nonjudgmental listener and a selfless supporter. And had it not been for her death, she probably would not have continued to be a part of my life post-graduation.

Michelle's death in March 2013 sent me spiraling into a deep grief, a grief which would mark the very face of my personality, identity, and life decisions for the next two years. My heart shuddered from the trauma - it's like the feeling you get when a car barrels down the street a little too close to you on the sidewalk, and the air seems to shake you back and forth for a moment. Slow-motion flashbacks from the moment I found out about her death intrusively invaded my thoughts.

Over the summer, I fell in love, and my thousand-year-old heart once again felt young. Somewhere in there, I realized I stopped thinking about Michelle every day. I still think about her, but I remember the days when I couldn't go fifteen minutes without thinking about her. It defined me. Now, God is telling a new story in my life. I thought I would never recover; I didn't want to recover. I wanted to show the importance of her life through my grief. But that's never what she would have wanted. I can see her now, scrunching up her face at me like I was crazy, as she often did, emphatically and skeptically asking, "Why??" I have grieved, but there is a time to grieve and a time to laugh, and I think God wants us to enjoy the blessings he has given us. Becoming thankful and joyful again has been a gradual journey. Now I realize that we don't get to raise our fists at God and demand answers. God asks in Job 38:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ...Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is your proud waves halt'?"

The question isn't, "God, how could you?" Yeah, it's a valuable academic question, but let's be honest: we're not just wondering, we are accusing. The true question is, "Do you trust the sovereign Lord?" Nonchristians aren't going to understand this. They'll say I'm intentionally blinding myself to the facts; I'm not. I'm just choosing to trust God in what I
do understand and in what I don't understand. And that's what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian is to trust God with your life, and that trust reaches into every nook and cranny. Trust God with your schoolwork, your relationships, your future, and yes, I even must trust God with Michelle. I have a long way to go. I'm not the woman I want to be. What I'm saying is that as the anniversary of Michelle's death comes around, I have a lot more perspective about it all than I did before. It wouldn't have taken a well-adjusted person three years to simply gain perspective, but I'm a really broken person.

I recently read that the goal of Christian living is not self-improvement, but knowing and enjoying God (Desiring God). That stuck with me. Without thinking, if I could sum up where I am, it would be to say, "I need to be better." But Christ tells us that we are complete in Him. I haven't handled all this well, and even in recovery, I still am not good. But God is good, and I am thankful for where He has taken me over the past three years. This month, I remember Michelle, but I do so from a place of freedom in Christ. Praise God.