Your Mouth or Your Ears – Only One Works At A Time

November 1, 2006 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Life, Religion 

First, a disclaimer.  I’m just as guilty as everybody else of what I’m about to write.  I’m also getting older, and as a result my wind wanders more than it used to.

In the PC(USA), we’re fighting.  It’s over gay ordination, it’s over Biblical inerrancy, it’s over the fundamental question of whether or not the Bible is a rulebook.  For this post, it doesn’t matter why we’re fighting.  Today we’re gonna talk about HOW we’re fighting.

Each side is alternating name-calling of the other side and arguments meant to convince the other side that they need to change their thinking.  I can’t do much here about the former – either you see those with whom you disagree as worthy of respect or you don’t.  But the latter CAN be fixed.

It’s a simple idea taught to youth, but forgotten with adults:

When your mouth is open, your ears are closed.

When you are speaking to someone, you are not listening.  Pretty simple, eh?  The implications go deeper than this.

When you are formulating a response to the other person’s argument in your head, your ears are closed.

We’ve all experienced this.  You sit in a meeting at work and somebody says something that you disagree with.  You immediately start working on making your rebuttal convincing, waiting for a break in the conversation to get your words in.  You’ve STOPPED listening – your brain is someplace else.

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You’ve been there too.  You have something to say.  You aren’t really listening, you’re like a tiger waiting to pounce at the right moment.  You aren’t hearing what the other person is saying, you’re just listening for the silence that you can fit your speech into.

How do we combat this?

More silence.  Respect the other person by listening to their argument.  Use the silence to allow the ideas to settle in.  Formulate your response when you don’t need to be open to what’s going on.

Don’t just speak to fill space.  Make your speech meaningful.  Have you ever been in a meeting where one person sits quietly in the corner, saying little?  When they do speak, does the whole room say “Ahhh.  Now I get it”?  That person has learned to make a lot of impact with few words.  In the future, that person’s utterances will be taken just that little bit more seriously – “He doesn’t say much, but what he does say is worth waiting.”  Have you ever been that person?  How much more satisfying was it than being the center of attention?

And last – you are NOT going to convince anybody if you call them names.  Or use terms that amount to calling them names – that hurt them with something important to them.  These are terms like “apostate”, “homophobic”, “Biblically unsound”, “uncaring”.  Once you’re angered the other party, you have completely lost the ability to change their minds.  Their ears are closed whether they are speaking or not.

Once we stop talking past each other and AT each other, we can talk TO each other.  We can learn FROM each other.  Then we have a chance at building a better world.

“Because I said so” is rarely convincing.

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