Listening

You are in a coffee shop, meeting with a friend over steaming lattes. While you are talking, your conversation partner seems engaged: They hold your gaze, smile at the funny parts, and nod warmly. You think they are a good listener, and you are excited to see them again soon. However, were they really listening? If you probed their mind during the conversation, what were they actually attending to and thinking about? Were they really listening attentively, or just creating the impression of good listening?

According to one recent study, we our attention wanders about 25% of the time. The researchers concluded:

“Speakers consistently overestimated their conversation partners’ attentiveness—often believing their partners were listening when they were not. Our results suggest this overestimation is (at least partly) due to the largely indistinguishable behavior of inattentive and attentive listeners. It appears that people can (and do) divide their attention during conversation and successfully feign attentiveness.”

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Listening to others—paying attention. (2) Listening to God—how often does our mind wander in our prayer life? (3) God listening to us—he never fails to hear us.

Billy Collins, the former poet Laurette of the United States, was recently asked by The New York Times Book Review, "How has the internet changed your writing?" Collins responded:

The internet asks us to speed up. Poetry invites us to slow down. I write with a pencil and paper, then use the computer only as a fancy typewriter. So, no change really, except in [the internet’s] role as the most persistent distraction in human history.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Distractions; Prayer—Of course there are many other distractions that can keep us from slowing down and being with God. (2) Bible reading and meditation—The Bible also invites us to slow down and listen to God speaking to us.

In an article in The Atlantic, Russel Shaw writes:

When my son was a toddler, I realized how much my emotional reactions influenced his. If I showed worry when he fell, he'd wail; if I remained calm, he'd recover. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. This taught me that parenting is about more than just teaching skills; it's about shaping emotions.

Our instinct is to protect our children, but overprotecting can hinder their development. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens any obstacle in their child’s way.

Lighthouse parents, on the other hand, provide support while allowing their children to learn from their experiences. Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.

The crucial shift is from fixing problems to listening. Listening teaches resilience and communicates trust in our children's abilities. Parenting can be stressful, but by letting them face challenges, we help them build the skills they need to thrive.

Hidden acoustic wonders called “whispering walls” have awed listeners since ancient times. The field of “archaeo-acoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, or elliptical enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery.

A whispering gallery allows whispered communication from one part of the internal side of the circumference to another specific part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls. This effect has been discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and Grand Central Station in New York, among others.

When a visitor stands at one focus the sound waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear the whispers from the opposite side of the gallery. Even when the room is filled with many people talking, the whisper can be heard, but only by standing in exactly the right location, others in the room won’t hear the whisper at all.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is possible to hear the slightest whisper spoken in a massive room filled with people, but only when you stand in just the right place. In the same way, in a noisy, bustling world, it is possible to hear the “whisper” of God (1 Kings 19:12), but only if we are standing in the right place of obedience, readiness, and quiet waiting.

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. Studies have shown that visual recognition requires a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it, and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.

The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second—elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders, and making you glance around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.

Hearing, in short, is easy. It’s your lifeline, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second.

The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention. Hearing is easy; listening requires lots of skill. Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

Luckily, we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: they are trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice—not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics. You may save yourself a couple of fights.

“You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Really listening to a friend or spouse is important to the relationship. It means giving them our full attention and putting them ahead of our own needs. How much more important it is to listen for God’s voice amidst the cacophony of noise in the world, and absorb what he has to say.

Steve Burns wasn’t conventionally handsome when he first auditioned to become the host of the Nickelodeon children’s show Blue’s Clues, but his weird, manic energy set him apart. In particular, after Burns would ask a question, he would get very close to the camera and incline his ear to show he was listening. Burns said in a recent interview, “I'd love to say that I was just a forward-thinking and insightful, brilliant actor, but it had nothing to do with anything like that. It was just desperation.”

What really sealed the deal, though, is how the children responded to him – one child in particular. MTV Networks, Nickelodeon’s parent company at the time, set up a focus group with toddlers, the intended audience demographic. Employee Lisa Headley brought in her two-year-old daughter. "She kind of like went a little feral, you know, dancing and carrying on, jumping up and down," Headley said. Burns ended up being hired as the host, and clips of Headley’s daughter excitedly responding to Burns were used in promotional advertisements for the show.

But Steve Burns didn’t get to meet that little girl until many, many years later. She’s now a TikTok influencer that goes by the name Astraea Regina, and they happened to be in the same comic convention in Indiana. When a friend told her that Burns was there, she dropped everything to go meet him.

"I went over to him and then I explained to him the story and his face looked so shocked," Regina said.

"I kind of thought she was just saying, 'I used to watch you on TV,'" Burns said. "I was like, 'Oh, cool, thank you. You know, that's great.' She's like, 'No, dude, that was me. I was the one who got you. I was the one in that focus group.' And that was just mind-blowing."

The two shared a hug, which was captured on social media and got more than a million views between TikTok and Instagram.

When Regina was asked why that video resonated so much with her followers, she struck an appreciative tone:

I think it gave a lot of people some context that a child's love and a child's adoration, and a child's voice actually does mean something. And I think Steve wanted that type of story to really come through because that's what he wanted someone to know, that he was still listening.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Children need to know there are loving adults willing to listen. By modeling a posture of patient engagement, we model for them the love of God, which is always present and available.

In the spring of 2000, a unique library was established in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's called the Menneskebiblioteket, which is Danish for, “The Human Library."

The library is, in the true sense of the word, a library of people. Readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from their bookshelf, represents a group in society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization, or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin, and so on.

Instead of checking out a book, you can have a conversation with someone who will share their story of being deaf, blind, autistic, houseless, sexually abused, or bipolar. The mission of the Human Library? To break down stereotypes and prejudices by fostering dialogue. Yes, you can ask these human books questions!

Their motto: "Unjudge someone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn't that what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount? "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." Instead of focusing on the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye, Jesus told us to “take the plank out of our own eye” (Matt. 7:1-5).

Roni Bandini is an artist and computer coder in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Like a great many Argentinians, he hears a lot of reggaeton music (a blend of reggae, hip-hop, and Latin rhythms). But not always voluntarily, that is.

In a post on Medium that has since gone viral, Bandini explained that the neighbor he shares a wall with plays loud reggaeton often and at odd hours of the day and night. But rather than pounding on the wall or leaving a note, Bandini decided to find a technical solution.

Bandini was inspired by a universal TV remote-control called “TV-B-Gone” that reduces unwanted noise in bars and restaurants from televisions that no one is watching anymore. So, he put together a contraption that could do the same thing with reggaeton music.

He used a small Raspberry Pi computer and AI that he trained to recognized reggaeton music. He then installed the device near the wall to monitor his neighbor’s music. Finally, he 3D-printed a name on his device: the “Reggaeton-Be-Gone.”

Any time it detects any reggaeton music, it will overwhelm his neighbor’s Bluetooth receiver with packet requests. He said, "I understand that jamming a neighbor’s speaker might be illegal, but on the other hand listening to reggaeton every day at 9 AM should definitely be illegal.”

There are three lessons here. First, if you want to be a good neighbor to someone who shares a wall with you, be mindful of when or how often you play loud music. Second, creativity and technical ingenuity can solve so many more problems than we think possible. But a third hidden lesson remains – so much hassle can be avoided if you simply take the initiative to communicate directly. Because who knows? Maybe Bandini’s neighbor might have turned the music down if he’d simply asked.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many small problems can be kept from growing into large problems by diplomatically discussing it with the people involved (Matt. 18:15-17). So much hassle can be avoided if you simply take the initiative to communicate directly.

Ashley Class was initially unconcerned when her oldest child complained about monsters in her room. Ashley said, “She was saying she heard monsters in her bedroom wall, but we'd been watching Monster's Inc. She was a little speech delayed, so when she tried explaining it, we thought she meant there were monsters in her closet." So, she and her husband downplayed her fears, in the hopes that it was just a phase.

“We told her, ‘Nobody is in that closet.’ We made jokes about fighting the monster. We gave her a spray bottle full of water that was her monster spray.” But after the little girl’s fear intensified into night terrors, Ashley and her husband began having second thoughts. So, the following month, when they noticed a few bees going into the attic of their 100-year-old farmhouse, they decided to call a pest control company.

The pest control people told her that she likely had honeybees in her attic, which means that they couldn’t just spray pesticides like they would for other insects. They assured her that the problem was likely minimal. But one beekeeper brought a thermal camera to conduct an infrared scan on the house, and was shocked at what he found.

Ashley said, “At first, I thought it was a body,” referring to the reddish glow behind one of the walls in her daughter’s bedroom. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it's a hive. He didn't even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall. Bees came swarming out like a horror movie.” The beekeeper estimated that there were over 50,000 bees in the wall.

And Ashley had to go back to her daughter to “fess up.” “We told her, ‘We found the monsters, you were right.’ Then we introduced her to the beekeeper and she was like, ‘No, he's a monster hunter.’ So, she called him Mr. Monster Hunter for the rest of the day, which was awesome.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Children need adult guidance, but sometimes their innocence enables them to see the truths that adults miss. “From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise?” (Ps. 8:2; Matt. 21:16).

I’ve noticed along the way of life that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators.

Diminishers … make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times—so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.

Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him [gave you] a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.

If you’re a young parent, you’re probably used to hearing “Why?” a lot! With that in mind, a new survey finds moms and dads field an average of 11 questions from their young children each day.

A new poll of 2,000 parents of kids under six finds that between being asked “What?” (37%), “When?” (22%), and “Why?” (11%), parents are always on call when their kids get curious.

Children most commonly ask questions to better understand the world around them, such as asking about animals, nature, current events, and home experiences. When asked about the most interesting question their child has ever asked, parents mentioned “Why is the sky so high?” and “Why can fish keep their eyes open in water?”

Children’s questions may be frequent, but they aren’t always easy, as parents admit they can confidently answer an average of only 42% of their child’s questions. Poll results also reveal that 81% of parents learn just as much from their child as their child learns from them. The average parent learns something new from their child about five times per week, and four in five parents are surprised by their child’s knowledge of certain topics.

Lew Wilcox and Bobby Rohrbach Jr. met in the summer of 1962, riding their bikes together in a small southern Ohio town.

These days, every Saturday, one picks the other up and they go out for breakfast, run errands, and talk about families, home repairs and how the world is changing. If one can’t remember a place or name, the other can fill in because they so often lived the same story. They didn’t outgrow the other or leave the other behind and still live within about five miles of their childhood homes. “I have a lot of friends but there’s something special about our friendship,” says Lew, 75, of his friend, Bobby, 73.

Yet as important as they are, people have fewer close friendships than they once did. Forty-percent of Americans say they don’t have a best friend at all, up from 25% in 1990. The best-friend gap is more pronounced for men, who typically have fewer close friends than women do. The percentage of men without any close friends jumped fivefold to 15% in 2021 from 3% in 1990, according to the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey.

Michael Addis, director of the Research Group on Men’s Well-Being, says, “We were taught for generations to focus on work, family, and productivity. Don’t share what is really going on inside with other men.”

Time together deepens bonds. Becoming a best friend takes 300 hours of togetherness, one study reported. Those fortunate enough to have friends through the decades develop a common history that fresh friendships often don’t.

If there was any doubt that the national mood could need a dose of uplift, more evidence showed up in late January. On X (formerly known as Twitter), the account for Elmo, the red Muppet from Sesame Street, asked what seemed to be a simple, innocuous question.

“Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”

In thousands of responses, social media users let Elmo know that no, they were not doing too hot. Users began pouring out their hearts to Elmo:

• “I’m tired, Elmo,” said one user.
• “The world is burning around us, Elmo,” said another.
• “Elmo I’m depressed and broke,” one wrote.
• Others told Elmo that they were anxious about the 2024 election.
• “Each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror. one that was previously unfathomable in nature,” replied author Hanif Abdurraqib. “However, I did have a good grapefruit earlier, thanks for asking.”

“I don’t think anyone anticipated how deeply this particular question would resonate,” said Samantha Maltin, a marketing officer for the Sesame Workshop. Maltin believes that Elmo’s question provoked a lot of feelings because his character is rooted in the nostalgic memories of so many millennials.

After about nine thousand responses in about 24 hours, the account posted again. “Wow! Elmo is glad he asked!” it read. “Elmo learned it is important to ask a friend how they are doing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is more important than ever to have dependable friends who will listen to us and to whom we will give a listening ear. Let’s remind ourselves and others that God is always available to hear our troubles and provide “mercy and find grace in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).

George Orwell’s book 1984 is one of our society’s most frequently referenced illustrations of what life would be like under an authoritarian government. In the book, citizens of the fictional nation of Oceania are under constant government surveillance, including in their own homes. Devices called telescreens display propaganda and record peoples’ actions. This allows the government to monitor people even in what should be the most private place they know—their homes.

Historically in the US, the Fourth Amendment protects Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, acknowledging the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects." It is a bedrock principle of the Bill of Rights.

But a new survey reveals that an astonishing number of Americans, particularly younger Americans, would be comfortable throwing this fundamental protection on the ash heap of history. The Cato Institute survey of Americans finds:

29% of Americans aged 18 to 29 respond affirmatively when asked, “Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?”

20% of Millennials between the ages of 30 and 44 also want everyone watched.

However, among Americans 45 and older, support for such totalitarian surveillance drops considerably to 6%.

From Ivy League campuses to the digital domains of Facebook, there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency. There is an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.

If these trends continue, the US may confront a very different privacy landscape in the future. It is possible that at some point, the American public will be open to extreme government overreach.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians might think that if we aren’t doing anything wrong what does it matter if we are being watched? But do you spank your children? Might some government official somewhere want to recast that as abuse? Do you teach your children that God made us male and female? Do you insist that marriage is between one man and one woman? What might some in the government think about that? To be constantly monitored is to be constantly assessed. And knowing, as we do, that our governments don’t measure right and wrong by God’s standards, we should fear the prospect.

In his autobiographical novel, Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri describes fleeing from Iran as a boy to escape persecution for his Christian faith. At one point, he asks the reader a question:

Would you rather have a God who listens or a god who speaks? Be careful of the answer … There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of “do as you please.” And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want law and justice to crush everything …. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love. Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious the answer is both. God should be both.

Time and again, Jesus proves to be a God who listens. People seek him out by the thousands—but he never refuses a conversation. The only time Jesus ever silences anyone, saying, quite literally, “Be quiet!” it’s a demon (Luke 4:35). Other than that, he’s willing to give anyone the time of day. Blind Bartimaeus shouts to him on a crowded road. While others scold him to keep quiet, Jesus beckons him over and gives Bartimaeus the floor. “What do you want me to do for you?” he asks …. Whatever the blind man had to say, Jesus was all ears.

He’s not just a sounding board, though. Jesus has something to say. Words are the very tools Jesus uses to bring forth his plans …. When his friend is dead and lying in his tomb and Jesus says, “Lazarus, come out!” and the dead man comes out …. In other words, when Jesus speaks things happen.

Jesus is a God who listens and a God who speaks, a God who simply enjoys talking with people. He doesn’t mind being inconvenienced. He’s willing to seek out those who differ with him …. because he is a God who knows, a God to whom all hearts are open and no secrets hid.

The fact that Jesus is the kind of God who wants to be in a personal relationship with us is remarkable compared to the false gods who either speak from on high or listen to us with blank stares .… The Christian faith reveals that we have more than just words, but the Word made flesh.

Actress Diane Kruger (National Treasure, In The Fade) was once offered a role that required her to play a young wife and mother, experiencing the loss of her husband and child. Since she hadn’t personally experienced such painful losses in her own life, Diane realized that the only way she could prepare herself for the important role, would be to connect with people and groups that were walking through extreme grief and similar experiences.

It is said that initially, she began to offer her own thoughts and responses with those who shared their stories in the groups she attended. However, she gradually realized that it would be far better for her to stop talking, and to start listening with empathy to their stories. That decision brought about a meaningful learning curve that helped her adapt to the role she had to play in the film.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In conversations, how often are we eager to air our thoughts and views without listening to the other person? The Bible however advises us to be careful of the words we speak, and about the importance of being willing to listen to others. James 1:19 says, “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak.”

R. Douglas Fields writes about the vigorous activity of the brain during sleep:

Midway between our unconscious and conscious minds there is the altered mental state of sleep. If you should live to the age of seventy-five, you will have spent perhaps twenty-five of those years asleep. What goes on in your head during that block of your lifetime is largely beyond your knowledge or comprehension. It is a mysterious and still mystical chunk of ourselves.

If sleep were simply a nightly hibernation, a shutting down of our system in the dark, it could be understood as a reasonable strategy to save power for the daytime when we can be physically active. Sleep might be much like a laptop computer going into temporary hibernation to save resources during long periods of inactivity. But hibernation is hardly what goes on in the human brain during sleep. Sleep is a vigorous period of brain activity. It is an altered state, not an inert state.

There are cycles and patterns of activity during our nocturnal unconscious life shuttling enormous amounts of activity through different brain circuits. Events of the day—conscious and unconscious—are reexamined, sorted, associated, filed, or discarded. Memories are moved from one place in the brain and filed in different places in our cerebral cortex according to such factors as the type of information they contain, their connections to other events, and the internal emotional states of mind stamping them with significance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We read repeatedly in Scripture that God spoke to one servant or another in a dream, or while they slept. He even spoke to unbelievers whose actions could impact his people. Why does God choose to speak to people while they sleep? Maybe it is because they are so busy or so distracted or so obstinate while awake that he speaks to them when they are asleep.

A recent survey of more than 1,600 teenagers by Harvard found that almost twice as many 14-to-18-year-old boys and girls feel comfortable opening up to their mothers (72%) as to their fathers (39%) about anxiety, depression, or other mental-health challenges. The gap suggests that fathers can become much more involved at home, offering the kind of emotional support that many children today so urgently need.

Intimacy between a parent and a child acts as a protective buffer against the day-to-day challenges of life. In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology researchers found that closeness with fathers was associated with fewer weight concerns, higher self-esteem, and fewer depression symptoms for both boys and girls.

A paper published in January of 2023 highlighted the role that dads play in building a child’s skills in regulating emotions. Fathers who were involved in caregiving and play, and who reacted with warmth and greater sensitivity to a child who expressed emotions, were significantly more likely to have children with better emotional balance from infancy to adolescence. Those skills in children are linked, in turn, with higher levels of social competence, academic achievement, and resilience. Conversely, poor emotional regulation skills are linked with anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems.

Boys can be especially affected by whether fathers are part of the emotional equation. Our culture often tells men that softer emotions are weak, so fathers may have to give sons explicit “permission to feel.” Because many men didn’t grow up with an emotionally warm male role model, they may lack confidence in their own abilities to be sensitive caregivers, which can hold them back.

The bottom line is that a strong fatherly connection helps young people to manage their emotions and deal with mental-health crises.