"The Christian helper needs to
realize that he or she is not only watching and promoting spiritual growth in
the other, but necessarily also earnestly pursuing it in his or her own life.
This is not only because we do God's work effectively in the measure that we
are united to him, but also because we can hardly ask others to do what we will
not take the trouble to do ourselves. Jesus never did. And any kind of helping
is so largely a matter of modeling. One thinks of the words of Emerson: 'What
you are thunders so loud I cannot hear what you are saying.' Yet even where our
words are concerned, we affect others more sometimes by offhand or incidental
remarks than we do by our most careful and concerned discourses. The quality of
our offhand remarks is largely determined by the quality of our lives.”
~ Thomas N. Hart, The Art of Christian Listening
