Listening

The bible always encourages us to be quick to listen and slow to speak. The reality of life is that our pride causes us to wish to speak and not listen.

We cannot be of edification if we do not listen. Even if we know more than those we speak with we cannot edify by speaking.

I have found often when I have had problems people are quick to give advice without listening to what I have to say. You see they wasted my time and their time by not listening before speaking. You see their advice was worthless because it was so general I could have found it on a thousand web pages and had already seen similar advice on many.

Maybe they could have been of use if they first spent a few moments listening. They might have had something helpful to say if they spent a few moments listening to my situation instead of spending five minutes saying vague generalities which do not apply.

You see speaking with an expert on a topic is not necessarily of use if you have a question if they will not take time to listen to your question. This is how it is often in life with many issues. We all speak so much that no progress is made because we have never listened to other's issue.

A related issue is trying to have too many friends. There are those who try to juggle fifty relationships and do none of the relationships well. They are friends with so many people they cannot keep any of the details of their friend's life straight.

You see relationships take time. There is a thing as having too many friends. The issue is that friendships take time because they are based on knowledge. We must listen and learn to be truly good friends.

You cannot really listen effectively to the lives of fifty friends. I personally would rather have two to three really close friends than fifty friends whose lives I cannot keep straight.

I find at times there is a loneliness of being with people you have spent so much time interacting with that exceeds that of being completely alone. I have never felt so alone as being around people who I have spent years trying to share my life with and I know massive amounts of things about them, but they cannot keep the smallest facts about me straight.

The reality is that these people were too busy to really try to have a relationship with me. I wish they had accepted the fact and not gone out of their way to pretend they cared.