You know they love you by how well they listen

Truly, somebody needs to hear you. You need to hear yourself. You both need that connection. And that need is of God, who seeks to liberate each and every one of us, and set us free—to become who the Lord of our creation set us up to be.

In the company of our own, those birds of a feather we fly with, those who we have joined, those who accepted us for who we are, who heard us and understood us, we do verily fly.

We all need to be heard to be loved. It’s not about ‘entitlement’; it’s a rule of life.

And what of those who loved us? They listened, and in being listened to, we learn, too, the gorgeous power of love in listening—I mean, listening with God’s interest and utterly no self-interest. In these terms alone, we employ the terms of love.

And as we learned this power, as an incarnational property of being alive in their midst, we agreed with God that that was our call to. We became listeners, and we became lovers, and we were never more blessed.

And as listeners, we become bolder and bolder in trusting those who proved their trustworthiness to us, and we gained yet two more skills. 

1. We discerned how to trust.
2. We grew adept at being trustworthy, as we sat with the trustworthy.

And it was beautiful. It is beautiful.

And all this started from agreeing to share our story, from agreeing to take that risk that we might be slapped down, again! Yet, to our sheer joyous surprise we weren’t slapped down, we were comforted and affirmed, and then we started to grow as God has eternally accorded us to grow.

So, in being listened to, in being loved, don’t hold your truth back—but find the trustworthy so you will be safe in your sharing and so you can experience the blessings every human being should.

~

Now, what is wise? There are times when we trust the wrong people, for sure. But no matter how much pain we endure in those moments of rejection and betrayal, it’s not the end of our hope, unless we’ll be resigned to that lamentable and dire reality. We don’t need to settle for that.

What’s wise is what we do as we continue to press forward, insisting that hope is the destination we’re certain to realise. Faith is the vehicle that gets us all the way to what we hope for, and yet hope sows its seed of courage into faith for the journey.

As we reach out in courage and test people with our story, we live the moment alive in the possibility of hope. We have the option of whether we’ll live our life alive. Not all of us do. And those of us who do don’t always do it. But this is the abundant life.

When I say ‘test people’ I do not mean take advantage of them; what we’re doing is putting ourselves in a position where people may take advantage of us. So, we’re testing a person’s faithfulness—will they prove trustworthy, and will we expose more of ourselves?

When we live in a place where we can speak our truth, and it’s accepted and valued and appreciated, living as being alive is the consequence.

We come to experience the life that we were destined to live. We don’t mind our relationship with our fear and anger and sadness when we can modulate them; when dark emotions begin to enhance our experience of life, and others’ experience of us, simply because we have righted the balance through being loved by being heard.

When we find our place to speak our truth, and we can trust the space, we feel safe even as we or they disagree. Indeed, true relationship finds its home in being able to respectfully disagree. Disagreement doesn’t need to dissolve into conflict that separates close friends.

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash