I wasn't born to be a great listener.
From the time I was a baby, I've had problems with my ears. I kept getting ear infections as a kid and eventually permanent tubes had to be placed inside my ears to help with drainage issues.
When I started to talk, most adults had no idea what I was saying, and many of my words were simply me trying to imitate the distorted sounds that I heard. By the time I started school though, I could talk perfectly fine, and I could hear well enough to not need any sort of assistance to get through school.
My hearing wasn't the greatest, but it certainly wasn't a handicap. Mostly I just didn't think about it because I didn't notice it. I remember some "constructive criticism" about my listening skills at parent/teacher conferences, but since I hated constructive criticism until a few years ago, I mostly just brushed it off. I figured they didn't know what they were talking about or didn't like me.
My teachers weren't the problem that time that I failed the annual hearing test at school. I just made jokes about it and told everyone that I wasn't really trying to listen during the test anyways, which was true. When I came back for the re-test, I managed to do something that probably no other normal kid would even think of trying to pull off- I cheated on my hearing test. It wasn't my proudest moment in life, but I wasn't about to let some doctor tell me that my hearing was bad enough that I needed special treatment. The nice lady who administered the test was also nice enough to wear glasses that day. I had to press a button when I heard sounds of various pitches, and whenever she started the sounds on her end I could see a light turn on in the reflection on her glasses. "I don't even know why they made you come back here," she said after I aced the test. "I don't know either," I replied, as I smiled and realized that I passed a hearing test because God blessed me with good vision.
My good vision didn't see the giant moth flying towards me at maximum velocity with enough time to duck. One fateful Sunday morning I was before my senior year of high school I was detasseling and a giant, bird-sized moth plunged straight into my ear at about 1000 mph. I've told this story a billion times and I don't feel like getting into the details but I'll summarize. Large moth flies into left ear at full speed, get's stuck too deep in ear to reach. Moth is still alive inside ear and shakes violently near my eardrum repeatedly, which sends me to my knees in gut-wrenching pain over and over again. I'm taken to the emergency room. The doctors take their sweet time and finally have to pull the thing out with the longest pair of tweezers I've ever seen in my life. Fortunately, that incident didn't cause me to lose all my hearing in my left ear, but it probably caused me to go from about 70% hearing in that ear to 50%. The ongoing ear infection that followed for a year and a half probably took that down to 40%. I'd guess my other ear to be at about 90% based on tests I've taken that I didn't cheat on and from my experience judging what other people can hear and what I can't. So that brings us to today.
Here's the thing- don't feel sorry for me. Those stories about how my hearing came to be less than 100% have absolutely nothing to do with my weakness. I just find them to be an interesting part of my journey in discovering my greatest weakness. Sure, sometimes I don't hear what people say for legitimate reasons, but more often than not I find I didn't hear not because I couldn't, but because I wasn't listening.
I remember one time when I was a teenager and my best friend Micah was over just hanging out in my room. I was playing video games and he was talking to me, when all the sudden I noticed he started to say the "whats" for me. He'd say, "Hey Bill, do you want to go workout later? What? Bill, do you want to work out later." When I asked why he was saying what and then repeating himself, he said it was because that's what always happened anyways whenever he talked to me so he was just getting it out of the way early. That was when I started to realize that I often said "what?" after almost anything was said to me. Was it because I didn't hear it? Not at all. In fact, usually if they didn't repeat themselves I would realize what they actually said just seconds later. The problem wasn't that I didn't hear Micah, the problem was that I wasn't listening to Micah.
Getting married called this to my attention even more. Lindsay needs me to listen to her a lot more often than my friends ever did. I get home from work, sit down, and she's talking to me about her day and other things, which I am actually interested in, but somehow I'm still not listening. I hear her, I'm nodding my head, I'm saying "yeah," and "oh really?" at all the right times. I even make eye contact. I'm zoning out for whatever reason, thinking about something else, and not giving my wife the attention she needs and deserves. Two weeks later we're driving somewhere and she reminds me that we'll be needing to go over our budget to purchase some snacks for a family gathering, and I'm caught totally off guard. "I told you about this two weeks ago, remember?" I insist she's never told me. She insists she has. Then somehow my subconscious brain takes me back to the one-sided conversation we had after I got off work that one day, and I realize that I heard her but didn't listen.
I have to concentrate as hard as possibly can to make sure I'm listening when I'm around people who would be less forgiving than my wife. When I'm at work, there's countless tiny little conversations with important information about something I need to do throughout the day, and I have to concentrate as hard as I possibly can to have average listening skills and not miss anything major. Technology helps me at work because I can put important events on my calendar and automatically be reminded, or I can send myself an e-mail with key information. I listen enough to survive in the work world.
Regular conversation is a struggle sometimes as well. We all know what it's like to talk to a good listener. Not only are they genuinely engaged with what you're saying, but they seem to care and almost always say the right things at the right times. People who have talked to me enough times probably wouldn't describe a conversation with me being anything like that. Sure, I can fake it if I have to for a little while. But there's way too many conversations where I'm distracted by my surroundings, or thinking about something else, or just thinking about the next thing I want to say. That last one is a killer and I know a lot of other people struggle with that too. That's probably why I'm better at internet conversations than real-life conversations. I have to wait for the other person to respond, I have to read their response, and then I take time to formulate my response. If there's anything great we could learn from internet communication and apply to real life, that might be it.
It's not that I never have genuine conversation and that I never listen. It's just that I miss a lot of opportunities and I catch myself pretending to listen way too often. The funny thing is that pretending to listen is probably harder than actually listening. It's not fair to the person I'm talking to. If one person isn't listening in a conversation, why even have it? Sometimes you'd be better off talking to yourself than to me. No, really.
I'm sure that I'm my own toughest critic, but there's times when it drives me crazy. One of my strengths is communication, but since I'm not a good listener my God-given ability to be a great communicator is utterly wasted at times. I hate it.
It's not like there's some easy cure. Listening isn't just something that I can just turn on and off like a light switch. I think listening is a skill that some are born with, and I wasn't. It's true. Listening just comes naturally for some people, but for others it's a struggle to develop. I can't emphasize this enough. I am a person who is aware of the struggle and I desire to be a good listener with all my heart. But I'm still not a good listener, and I'm actually quite terrible at it sometimes. It's probably my greatest weakness, and I can barely put into words how incredibly frustrating it is to want to be a good listener and to not be.
Lebron James first dunked a basketball in 8th grade. Even before that, it was very obvious that he was a gifted athlete who could become a great basketball player. Me on the other hand, I'm 5'5 and my vertical jump might make it over a cinder block on a good day. I once placed 3rd in a free throw shooting contest...because there were 3 people in my division. Two years ago some friends convinced me to join their rec basketball team. "It will be fun," they said. My season highlights included air-balling a layup and getting schooled by a girl. It wasn't fun. I was born with pretty much the exact opposite genetics as Lebron James, and it's no wonder that I struggle out on the court. But it's also worth mentioning that I never practiced. Yes, I'm naturally a terrible basketball player but that doesn't mean I couldn't get better. In fact, I'm confident that if I devoted myself to practice every day for years and years, I would certainly be better than I am right now.
The way I see it, my listening skills are no different. I want to get better, and I'm glad that I see my weakness more than ever before. It's going to take years of effort, and in the end I have to accept the fact that I'll probably never be the Lebron James of listening. By God's grace, what? By God's Grace maybe someday I'll be a decent enough listener to see my communication skills blossom in new ways. I'll start to have more of those genuine conversations that I feel I'm constantly missing out on now.
If God made both of my ears able to hear 100% again, you'd call it a miracle. Well I say it would be a bigger miracle if God teaches me how to listen.
