Monday, June 10, 2013

modeling listening

"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