Home > Author > Adam S. McHugh
21 " It signaled a big shift in my approach to the Bible when I started calling it not "reading" but "listening." In listening to the Bible, I remind myself that behind all the words, there is a voice. I aim to listen to a person before I dissect a text. McKnight calls this a "relational" approach to the Bible, one that "invites us to listen to God speak in the Bible and to engage God as we listen. "
― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction
22 " This is one of the greatest challenges for a listener: to delay your response so that others can express their present emotions and unresolved tensions. "
23 " Answers are too often held in a closed fist, fingers wrapped tightly around them. They can isolate us and keep us in the same place, leaving us wondering why no one else is coming to us and our conclusions. Questions balance on the tips of your outstretched fingers, open and welcoming, inviting fresh possibilities and refinement. Questions move you toward the world and toward community, drawing other into them and you into theirs. "
24 " The familiarity and informality of some churches in the evangelicaltradition, with their best intentions of devotion and hospitality, can actually exclude introverts. Times of greeting and sharing in a public context, especially with strangers or distant acquaintances, are unnatural and sometimes painfully uncomfortable. In fact, some introverts I interviewed conceded that they commonly show up late on Sundays to avoid the awkward preservice socializing and greeting times. "
― Adam S. McHugh , Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture
25 " Typical evangelism books always seem to locate airplanes as the most advantageous setting for evangelistic encounters, where, at 30,000 feet, restive unvelievers are unable to escape the advances of brash Christians. "
26 " As introverts who are followers of Jesus, we must remember that our introversion does not ultimately determine our thoughts and behaviors. "
27 " People sometimes think of introverts as listless or despondent, the Eeyores of the social scene. But it’s not that we have less energy, it’s that we lose it through interaction. "
28 " The combination of solitude and internal processing means that many introverts are more oriented toward ideas than they are interacting with people. "
29 " Introverts are rarely content with surface-level relationships and do not generally consider our acquaintances to be friends. We may find small talk to be disagreeable and tiring. Because we often prefer to spend time in one-on-one interactions, rather than group socializing, our relationships can run deeper. "
30 " Introverts’ wounds usually begin in childhood. Our families of origin convey to us messages about introversion, which set us on a path of either self-acceptance or self-criticism. "
31 " Introverted wounds bleed in our minds and hearts, and bleed out in our behaviors, actions and relationships. "
32 " Hearing is an act of the senses, but listening is an act of the will. "
33 " The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God’s presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God’s word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it.” "
34 " We’re lonely. Mother Teresa called loneliness the leprosy of the Western world, maybe even more devastating than Calcutta poverty.9 Loneliness drives us to talk about ourselves to excess and to turn conversations toward ourselves. It makes us grasp on to others, thinking their role is to meet our needs, and it shrinks the space we have in our souls for welcoming others in. That loneliness would keep us from listening, and others from listening to us, is a tragedy, because being listened to is one of the great assurances in this universe that we are not alone. "
35 " Though introverts look calm on the surface, our brains are bubbling with activity, and thus we require less external stimulation than extroverts. "
36 " Introverts often prefer writing to speaking, because writing uses a different neurological pathway in the brain than speaking does. "
37 " Psychology professor David Benner says that a major obstacle to growth in our listening abilities is that most of us already think that we’re good listeners. "
38 " A church that is self-focused and insular is a social club, not a church. "
39 " Pain is too serious for pat answers and glib God-talk. "
40 " The Bible should never close us to hearing God's voice in other venues; rather it ought to open us to recognize it whenever we hear it. In a sense, the Scriptures are a tuning fork for adjusting our ears to the tone of God's voice. It attunes us to the quality, the pitch and the cadence of God's voice, and to the character that his voice expresses, so that we can identify his true voice over false ones. "