LISTEN (part of the series Stop. Listen. Love.)
1. Listening helps us to get it right.
My wife and I attended the Alpha Marriage course a few years ago and I will never forget what they had to say about listening. We listen, so that we can know what is going on with the other person. We listen so that we can get it right! It sounds obvious, but how often do we listen before trying to encourage?
If you are in trouble and go to a lawyer, if you are sick and go to a doctor, if your car breaks down and you go to the mechanic – what do they do? Well, hopefully, they listen first. If they just try to fix something without knowing what to fix, they may spend a whole lot of energy, money and time, and not even get to the thing that’s not working.
2. Prepare to heal.
Once you have stopped, focussed and know what’s wrong, you can now prepare to heal. Healing is a process, it doesn’t happen quickly. When I was 12, we went on a family holiday to the Carmel Christian Guest Farm in George. It was over Christmas and we’d spent the day swimming down at Vic Bay and that night, I woke up with intense ear-ache. I lay in bed in with tears in my eyes, hoping the pain would go away, but it didn’t, it got worse, to the point that I began throwing up. The next day was Christmas… so you can imagine how many doctors work in a sea-side town on Christmas day!
Somehow my parents managed to find an emergency doctor and we rushed off to see him. I sat on his examination bed whilst he listened to my parents explain and then he examined my ears, only to find that I had a massive inner-ear infection. I was expecting him to poke something in and fix the problem. I could feel the pressure and thought, “well if you just relieve the pressure, I’ll be fine.”
But he didn’t, he prepared for healing by giving my parents antibiotics to clear up the infection. There was no quick fix, I just had to wait whilst the healing took its course. Of course, because the doctor had listened and prepared, the infection went away and the pain was gone within a few hours. If we are going to encourage others, we need to know that we must prepare to be a part of the healing process.
3. When we listen, we can be USED BY GOD. If we don’t listen, we will miss out on an opportunity to encourage that person in the way that God wants them to be encouraged. I believe that part of God’s plan for allowing suffering is that it allows us to become a part of His divine plan to heal and encourage.
God could quite easily fix all our problems by Himself, but He chooses to include us in the journey, because He knows how awesome it is to encourage someone, either through being there or by sending a miracle. We miss so many miracles in life purely because we ignore, resist or just don’t listen.
Let us learn to Stop AND Listen, that’s the only way that we’ll start to become better encouragers for CHRIST!
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