Posts Tagged: Deuteronomy 6:4-6

“WHAT WE LISTEN TO”

On June 14, 2017 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“Oh be careful little ears what you hear!”  (Words from a Christian song for very small children.)

  4 “Listen, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

  5 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.

  6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-6, New Living Translation.)

“So pay attention to how you hear. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given. But for those who are not listening, even what they think they understand will be taken away from them.” (Luke 8:18, New Living Translation.)

I have big ears.  I am the first to admit that.  But the size of my ears isn’t the crucial matter; what matters is how I use my big ears.

This morning, I was listening to National Public Radio’s show “Morning Edition” and a bit of NPR’s program “1A.”  There was a lot of bad news.  (I almost typed “bad noose”—a Freudian near slip, if ever there was one!)  Some of the news items involved a terrible fire in a high rise in London, a shooting of Republicans who were practicing baseball, and the questioning of Jeff Sessions, our current attorney general.

I was finishing up the dishes, as it began to rain.  I felt that gentle internal nudge, the one I’ve learned to call “God’s leading,” suggesting that I turn off the radio and listen to the rain.

And the rain was beautiful.

I am not suggesting that I or anyone else should not listen to bad, uncomfortable news, or news that contradicts our own opinions and values.  We should.  But I wonder sometimes if we listen enough to the rain, or to our significant others, or to the songs of birds.

Jesus taught that we should be careful what we listened to, as well as how we listen.  I need to (we need to) pay attention to the very process of our listening.  In the Luke 8:18 passage that I quoted as part of the lead-in to this post, the verbs for “hearing” are in the present tense.  The Greek present tense often suggests continual, repetitive action.  Learning to listen is an ongoing process.  To paraphrase an old commercial tagline for milk, “We never outgrow our need for listening.”

Despite my big ears, I am not a particularly good listener.  But I would like to become one.  To listen, to pay attention with the ears, is a wonderful gift we could give to ourselves and to one another.

Care to join me in a new organization?  Perhaps we could call it the “Everyone Attends Regularly Society” (E.A.R.S. for short.)

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