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.