Are We Listening Well?

Hanging out with my grandchildren always gives me inspiration for my daily blog. When I watched “The Lego Movie” with my youngest grandson, I heard Emmett say, “I think I got it, but just in case, tell me the whole thing again. I wasn’t listening.”

I think I’m too often like Emmett. Listening well hasn’t always been my strong point. I had (and still do have at times) the tendency to be thinking of a response to someone speaking to me instead of “listening well” to them. There were times when I even cut someone off because I thought I needed to insert my experience into the conversation before they even finished sharing their story with me. Oh my goodness. I apologize to those of you who were the recipients of my not “listening well”.

I had a beloved pastor who always made me (and others) feel like I was the only one in the room when we talked. His eyes were on me. He didn’t let others distract him from listening to me. He listened well.

Have you ever had something really important to say to someone but you saw them texting, knowing full well, you didn’t have their undivided attention and weren’t “listening well” to you? Or maybe someone was trying to talk to you and at the same time you were texting, but you said: “I’m listening….go ahead!” In reality, we weren’t listening WELL at all.

Imagine what God must feel like when He’s sending us messages all the time and we’re not listening well to His voice. We’re distracted or preoccupied or just maybe, we don’t even want to listen. You know how our children have selective hearing? You can call out their name over and over and they don’t respond, but if you say something like “Ice Cream”, they’ll come running. Just like our kids, we, too, have selective hearing. We listen to what we love. God is communicating with us all the time. He wants us as we want our kids, to “listen well”.

So how do we listen well? We listen well by guarding our hearts. It’s easy to be sidetracked, especially when we’re so busy. We’re running here and there, taking care of business and trying to figure out how to do this or that. God is always speaking to us, but our hearts are distracted as we are being controlled by busyness, stress, and anxiety. How many times did we miss a solution or answer to our prayers because we weren’t listening well? We must guard our hearts so that when He speaks….we’re tuned in to His frequency and can hear Him loud and clear.

Isn’t it time we become respectful of others and we pay attention and “listen well” to them? And, above all, isn’t listening well for God’s voice a sure way to make right decisions? He holds the answers to everything we need to live a victorious life, so why would we allow anything to come between our ears AND His voice? Isn’t it time for us to start LISTENING WELL?