Have you noticed that our ability to listen is highly degraded in this Tiktok media age? Listening requires a special kind of concentration.
Here is a way to measure if you’re truly listening: How often do you have a whack-the-forehead moment, realizing you were wrong, see a new perspective, or are uncomfortably shocked into reconsidering an opinion?
Only a divine, omniscient being will never say “Oh, I didn’t see that coming. Oh, I never considered that perspective.”
If you aren’t occasionally knocked into an awkward moment of re-evaluation, you’re not listening hard enough to a diverse set of voices.
[Sidebar: One of the striking things about all the biblical accounts of God speaking to people via angels, strangers, voices from heaven, and dreams: The message is never quite what you’d expect them to hear, and is never ‘convenient.’ For example, Samuel isn’t told that he’ll grow up to be a great prophet, but that God is going to destroy Eli, his father figure. I score these accounts as true, because made-up stories would be quite different.]
Hold this in tension with this key insight about human nature: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone opts for the latter.” (John Kenneth Galbraith)
Why is this? We’re social creatures, and most of our opinions are the opinions of a group. These opinions are resilient in the face of conflicting information. It’s quite difficult to develop a viewpoint or opinion at odds with your primary group. Teaching point: make sure you’re in a good group!
