Earning Back the Right to be Heard
A dear friend posted a video and photos of her young child’s gentle coaxing of a frightened feral kitten from under their house. His patience fueled by his desire to win the kitten into his embrace, coupled with a soothingly sweet voice, eventually earned the trust of his now affectionate pet.
Building trust requires a relationship built on safe ground. Humans require the same safe space in order to trust and receive another’s words and actions. A friend of mine recently posted this helpful quote by Edwin H. Friedman:
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
Creating a safe emotional context is vital for healthy relationship. In today’s argumentative and heated environment, we need to be willing to hear, often long before we should speak. Decades ago I spent four years on staff with a ministry to high school students called Young Life. Their mantra in developing relationships with students was, as staff and leaders, we needed to “earn the right to be heard.” I believe that the church has been talking at the world with no safe context for so long that, in many places and on many subjects, we have lost the right to be heard. The Apostle Paul wrote that words with the wrong attitude are like a noisy cymbol clashing in the ears. For too long, and far too loudly, much of the church has been a grinding voice in the culture so that culture gives a big eye roll and no longer listens.
What’s the remedy? First, we must be overwhelmed with the pursuit and nearness of Jesus ourselves. We must see and experience the safe context He provides that has made Him a safe place for guilty, weary, sinful people like us to find rescue. Look into the Scriptures and see the actions of God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Witness the initiating work of His grace. In a world where the religious Pharisees were pointing out the woes of people’s sin and trapping them in legalistic teaching, the beat down and disenfranchised were hungry for someone to hear them and welcome them in. God in the flesh was and is their and our rescue. Jesus came not to save the righteous but sinners. After Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, they were naked and ashamed. When we sin we too feel exposed and ashamed at some level. But God is the initiator in the relationship. He walks into the garden and Adam and Eve hear Him coming. Like us, their inclination was to hide. But He pursued them in order to rescue them. He came in gentleness walking in the garden. He asked them questions and listened. He did not use words to overpower them. That is the story of Scripture from the beginning to end. Every single patriarch, disciple, and follower of Christ experienced God as the initiator. Have we forgotten by whom we were engaged and changed? Have we forgotten the kindness of God? We must stop thinking that we are morally superior to the those outside the church and stop attempting to overpower them with our words and begin to listen to their fears, disappointments, dreams, temptations, and same entrapments of the world that we encounter. Empathizing begins to lay a foundation in our own hearts for understanding others.
Secondly, we must pursue each other with His grace and speak it to one another inside the church. If God’s kindness leads us to repentance, than us displaying His received kindness to each other as Christians should dissolve many of the divisions and quarrels of which we have become so adept. Laying aside our rights and desires for the sake of others is a biblical hallmark exercised by Christ Himself. Judgment begins in God’s house with God’s people. Introspection ought to start with us as we relate to each other within the church.
Thirdly, by the same grace He displays to us in the body of Christ, we must pursue others outside the church. Before we speak, we must pursue. Before we speak, we must listen. Only after much listening and empathizing to hear the wounds of another’s heart will any words of healing from us have a beginning place to be received. How can someone hear grace if they have not received grace? Finger wagging is never a winsome vehicle of communication for the gospel. Arguing is rarely, if ever, a life-changing strategy.
The church has a long road ahead of it if it wants to be a heard voice crying in the wilderness with any desire of having influence in that wilderness. It starts with you and me. Are we willing to listen to Jesus and follow after Him rather than mimic and encourage the cultural anger in front of us?
“So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth . . .”
- 2 Timothy 2:22-25 ESV