It is hard work to listen, really listen, to what another person is saying. It takes focus, effort, patience, and tremendous discipline to listen to understand or to learn, instead of listening to reply, explain, or defend. (I am not very good at this, but I am trying to get better.)
When someone has an erroneous preconception about about me - the words inside that person's mind that codify his or her understanding about what I think or believe, why I do what I do, etc. - that preconception can be much stronger and have more influence than anything I say or do to try to communicate the truth to that person. People want to believe what they want to believe, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The words we think - whether they have any basis in truth or not - can become so deeply entrenched that they skew our perception of reality.
In a difficult or emotionally tense conversation, what someone else says to me or about me often says more about the person speaking than it does about me personally. Words reveal more about the heart of the person speaking than they do about the person to whom their words are directed or about whom they speak. (Learning this one concept has completely transformed the way I listen...most of the time.)
Things I already knew about words, but that I have been recently reminded of anew:
Words have tremendous power for good or evil. Words can be used as instruments of healing or as weapons of war, and there is a place and a time for each. Conscious of this truth, I need to think before I speak/write, and I need to choose my words carefully.
The more I talk, the more apt I am sin. "When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise" (Proverbs 10:19). Sometimes, I must speak; but sometimes, I need to be silent. Likewise, sometimes I need to listen to what another has to say (really listen), and sometimes I need to walk away.
Words are intoxicating, and words, like alcohol, produce happy drunks, mean drunks, sad drunks, drunks who do crazy or wicked things they would never do sober. When a person talks, and then talks more and more and more, throwing down words like champagne at a New Year's Eve party, that person may exhibit a personality completely different from the one he or she exhibits when "sober."
Words are addictive. Like alcohol, words create a heady buzz that some cannot resist - they cannot stop once they've started. They cannot resist making just one more comment, adding one more verbal flourish or jab, saying one last word (and then another, and another).
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Words are one of the things that set us humans apart from the animals. They are a gift from our Creator. It is through words that we are able to know God. And it should be through our words that we reflect His truth and beauty most clearly.
"But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment" (Jesus, speaking in Matthew 12:36).
Does this verse give you pause? Does it sober you? It sure does me.
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