Quick To Listen

I got into it with somebody last week. Not a fight exactly. A conversation that went sideways.

About two minutes in I realized I wasn't listening to him. I was waiting. Loading the next thing I wanted to say while his mouth was still moving. And when he finished I said my piece and felt pretty good about it for maybe an hour.

Then it sat on me the rest of the night.

James saw this coming two thousand years ago. "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires."

Read the order he put those in. Listen first. Speak second. Anger last, and slow.

We have flipped it completely. Anger comes first now. It's the fastest thing in the room. Then we speak, usually into a phone, usually to people who already agree with us. And listening comes last, if we get to it at all.

Here's the part that stings. James wasn't writing to the culture. He was writing to the church. To people who had already decided to follow Jesus. He was saying you can be right about God and still be a hard person to be around.

I know that guy. Some weeks I am that guy.

The thing about listening is it costs you something. It's slow. It means you might hear something that makes your position more complicated. It means for a minute you're not the one talking, and if you have built any part of your identity on being the one with the answer, that minute feels like losing.

But look at how God deals with us. He is not in a hurry with people. Scripture says over and over that he is slow to anger. Not incapable of it. Slow. He hears the whole thing before he responds. Jesus asked questions constantly, and he already knew every answer. He asked anyway, because a question hands the other person some dignity.

That's what listening actually is. It's dignity. You're telling somebody they're worth the time it takes to understand them.

So here's what I'm trying, and I'm not good at it yet.

When somebody stops talking, I wait three seconds before I answer. It feels like an eternity. It also stops me from saying about half of what I was going to say.

When I feel that heat come up in my chest, I try to name it before I act on it. Just to myself. Usually it isn't even about the person in front of me.

And when I disagree with somebody, I try to say their side back to them first, in a way they would agree with, before I say mine. If I can't do that, I don't understand them well enough to argue with them yet.

None of that is complicated. All of it is hard.

James says a few verses later that if you think you're religious but you can't control your tongue, you're fooling yourself and your religion is worth nothing. That's a rough sentence. But he's not trying to shame anybody. He's pointing at the cheapest possible test of whether your faith has gotten past your head.

You want to know if God is changing you? Watch how you handle the next conversation you didn't want to have.

Be quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to get mad.

It won't win you anything online. It will make you somebody people can actually talk to. And there aren't many of those left.

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