Are You Listening?

previously published at https://unitedchurch.love/blog/are-you-listening

Are you listening?”

I’ve been asked this a fair number of times in my life. I’m going to be honest: many of these times, the answer was no. There’s a lot going on in my head; my thoughts are like the ball in an old-school pinball machine. If what you are saying isn’t more interesting than the blinking and dinging lights of the ideas inside my brain, there is a good chance you will lose me.

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD at 40 years old. I’m not surprised by the diagnosis. In fact, it explains a lot of things about my life and my past. It puts them into perspective, a framework that I needed to understand who I am and how I move through the world.

“Are you listening?”

Listening is hard. For some of us it is really, really hard. It’s estimated that about ten percent of the population has ADHD. That’s a lot of us out there. I recently started seeing a therapist who specializes in coaching people with ADHD. One of the exercises my coach has me work on is meditating—sitting quietly and noticing when my thoughts go flying off (as they inevitably do), and then bring them back. It’s the noticing and then bringing the thoughts back that is the important part.

Noticing is a kind of listening. Listening to yourself, your body, your emotions, not just reacting to them. Listening to the important messages your body is sending you all the time, messages we are trained to ignore. When we ignore these important messages, we end up hurting ourselves and others.

Are you listening?

Even Paul writes about ‘taking every thought captive.’ Maybe this isn’t quite what he had in mind when he wrote those words, but I think of them when I sit down to meditate. Learning to stop and notice—to pay attention, to listen—is an important part about finding our own place in this world, but also for understanding where we fit into the greater scheme of things.

When I talk, I can only talk about what I have seen or heard or imagined or experienced. While it may be true that each one of us is the Main Character in the soap opera “My Life,” if we rely solely on our own perspective to write our story, we only have 1/ 7.674 billionth of the picture. That is a startlingly myopic view of the world. If we only listen to the stories that are familiar and comfortable, the ones that remind us of our own story, the ones that re-enforce our own point of view, how astonishingly, cripplingly small that story will be.

Are you listening?

When we listen to the stories of those outside of our tiny slice of life, that is when we grow. If I want to grow as a person, grow as a friend and citizen, as I believe we are all called to do as people who proclaim Jesus, we need to seek out the perspectives and the lived stories of people outside of our own demographics, outside the dominant stories we are given. Jesus challenged the dominant narratives of his time. Let’s follow his example. How do we do this? By noticing the stories we are told: What is the message of this story? Who is telling it? Why are they telling it? There is always a reason. Unless we stop and notice the motivations and implications behind our culture's stories, we won’t know if they are beneficial for all of us, or only a small few. Then we are given the gift of noticing who is not being represented in these stories. Who is being hurt by them or left out? In turn, we can give the gift of listening to those people, their experiences, their point of view. When we look for stories from view from outside of ourselves, we get a little closer to the big picture—the way the story looks from God’s point of view.

Are you listening?

Whether it’s our kids, our partner, God, family, or race relations, we all lose when we fail to notice, when we stop listening. I’ve been making extra effort this last couple years to listen to those outside of my experience. I’m a cis, WASP-y, female from an upper middle-class background. I grew up learning about the importance of diversity and equality. I truly believed that we as a group were on our way toward making that not only the ideal, but the norm. I knew we had a long way to go, but until I focused on listening to voices outside of my own experience and noticing their pain, I couldn’t understand how big the gulf between us truly is.

I’m not saying I understand. My journey is just starting, and I’m definitely looking into a dim mirror, as I try to look past the lens of my own lived experience. When we seek out and listen to the stories of those whom we may share little within the Venn diagram of life, we gain insight into how we can work toward a new way of moving through the world. I can see a new hope for the future, one that looks a little more like heaven.