I talk a lot. Ask anyone. Especially my mom. When I was in second grade I remember my teacher sending a note home to my parents to address my excessive talking problem. I decided I wasn’t going to give my parents the note, but, even at seven, I was smart enough to open the letter and read it first. The last line included a request for the letter to be signed and returned. I was devastated.
I was even more crushed when just a few days letter I had to call my mom from the school phone to tell her I was talking too much. I cried and cried. Looking back, my mom was probably more concerned about the fact that I was bawling over telling her I talked too much at school than the fact that I talked too much at school. (I mean, tell her something she didn’t know).
In fourth grade I was moved to the boy’s table to separate me from all the friends I talked to too much. In seventh grade I was threatened with In School Suspension, in tenth grade I had to copy pages of the dictionary by hand. Anyway, you get the point. I talk a lot. If I wasn’t a big talker it wouldn’t have taken me fifteen sentences and a sentence fragment to introduce a post about listening.
I talk a lot, but I’m learning to listen.
A man came into work today and you could tell he just wanted to talk. He was sitting at the bar, not far from the host stand, in the same seat he sat in the last time he came in. His name is Felix and I believe that he really just wants someone to talk to, someone to listen. So we had a conversation; Felix did most of the talking, I did most of the listening. He told me about growing up in the Catholic church, he told me about battling with cancer. He told me about getting lost in Columbia and his search for true Christianity.
He didn’t say that he was looking for true Christianity, but as he described a faith that was about love, not legalism, unconditional acceptance, not condemnation, and a God that was with you everywhere, not just at the altar of a somber church on Sunday mornings, I realized that that was what he was looking for, whether he realized it or not. He asked questions about the God that I believe in and about the Jesus that I follow. I answered his questions as best as I could and said “I don’t know” when I just didn’t know. I recommended a book that asked the same questions he was asking, but actually had an answer, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.
I have to admit that conversations like this make me a little uncomfortable. Men old enough to be my father who want to talk to me while sipping an alcoholic beverage at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Thursday are the kind of men I generally try to stay away from. However, I am also called not to have a “spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” I’m not going to give a stranger my contact information but I can give him a few minutes and a quiet, listening ear.
At the end of the conversation, Felix gave me something in return for my ear. The first time Felix came into the restaurant while I was there I had mentioned that I was going on a mission trip over the summer. He hadn’t forgotten. Before he left Felix gave me a brand new bottle of pepper spray (in case I needed it somewhere I traveled), a bag of guardian angel pins to give to the other team members going on the trip with me, and a check for 100 dollars written out to my church specifically for the trip.
I talk a lot, but I am learning to listen.
Although conversations are always two-sided, I have found that people benefit more from my uninterrupted attentiveness than the words that I can say. I am also beginning to see a beautiful parallel between that realization and the way I talk to God: We often complain when God seems silent, when He is not giving us answers to our prayers quickly enough. But maybe God knows that even more than we need an answer, we need someone to talk to who won’t interrupt and who always will listen.
In the book of James, we are urged to be quick to listen and slow to speak; the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus expressed the same idea when he said, “We were given two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” This is what I am learning to do so, please, if you have something to say, as Ross Perot once said, “I’m all ears!”
*Image from Dreamstime stock photography collection.
