Good listening requires patience > 목회자칼럼

• 목록

Here Bonhoeffer gives us something to avoid: “a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say.” 

This, he says, “is an impatient, inattentive listening, that . . . is only waiting for a 

chance to speak.” 

Perhaps we think we know where the speaker is going, and so already begin 

formulating our response. Or we were in the middle of something when someone 

started talking to us, or have another commitment approaching, and we wish they 

were done already.

Or maybe we’re half-eared because our attention is divided, by our external 

surroundings or our internal rebounding to self. 

As Dunn laments, “Unfortunately, many of us are too preoccupied with ourselves 

when we listen. Instead of concentrating on what is being said, we are busy either 

deciding what to say in response or mentally rejecting the other person’s point of view.”

Positively, then, good listening requires concentration and means we’re in with both ears, 

and that we hear the other person out till they’re done speaking. 

Rarely will the speaker begin with what’s most important, and deepest. 

We need to hear the whole train of thought, all the way to the caboose, before starting 

across the tracks.

Good listening silences the smartphone and doesn’t stop the story, but is attentive 

and patient. Externally relaxed and internally active. 

It takes energy to block out the distractions that keep bombarding us, and the peripheral 

things that keep streaming into our consciousness, and the many good possibilities we 

can spin out for interrupting. 

When we are people quick to speak, it takes Spirit-powered patience to not only be 

quick to hear, but to keep on hearing.