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The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction QUOTES

The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction QUOTES

1 " The listening life is based less on the content heard and more on relationship with the One who speaks. Like Elijah, we can even come to listen for the silences, because God's silences have a different texture to them. His silences are full. When they come, we know that the story is not over. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

2 " 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

3 " 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. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

4 " 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. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

5 " Hearing is an act of the senses, but listening is an act of the will. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

6 " 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. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

7 " 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. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

8 " Pain is too serious for pat answers and glib God-talk. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

9 " 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. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

10 " We could paraphrase "repent and believe" with "close your ears and listen." Obedience has both a stop and start to it. We turn our backs to the old voices and offer our attention to Jesus' voice.

We desire for God's voice to crescendo in our lives, with the competing voices fading away. This means that we must ruthlessly silence the calls of other masters. We confess our auditory rebellions to others, since somehow moving the jaw in confession seems to unplug our ears. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

11 " Anger is a strong, protective emotion that can help us through a difficult situation. But it's also what's called a "presenting emotion," meaning it often shows itself first but underneath it are more vulnerable emotions, like hurt or sadness.

Anger's second purpose is to usher us into the deep emotions underneath it and to give us clues as to how we can be healed... this is a matter of asking questions.

The AHEN principle helps shape your questions...
What am I feeling?
What is the hurt beneath the anger?
What is the expectation beneath the hurt?
What is the need beneath the expectation? "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

12 " Listening to people in pain is about giving them room to grieve and weep and rage and doubt. We're not there to spiritualize their pain or theologize their experience. Our talk... takes space, when instead we want to give space. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

13 " Listening and silence are not necessarily the same thing, but silence is a really good start. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

14 " What the Bible portrays as a household of faith instead becomes a scattering of encampments, people who warm themselves by their own fires, whoop with their own war cries, listen solely to their appointed leaders and only interact with the other camps when firing arrows. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

15 " Wisdom, on the other hand, is a deep, relational knowledge that comes through slow listening, allowing what we hear to steep and simmer in us. And it requires us to listen to voices that challenge us and present us with the unexpected, forcing us to weigh what we hear against what we believe. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

16 " When we open the Bible we must do so in faith that God has the power to resurrect dead letters. As Scot McKnight says, "What we are looking for in reading the Bible is the ability to turn the two-dimensional words on paper into a three-dimensional encounter with God." It is nothing short of a miracle when, in what amounts to sorting through ancient mail, my world is addressed, my language spoken, my name called. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

17 " I want to propose the spiritual discipline of the long walk. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

18 " You are not the expert on another person's life. They know themselves better than you ever will. The solution to their problems lies within them, and good listening involves helping another person find it, not solving their problems for them. You want to encourage the speaker to think for himself, so when you are listening well, you are practicing good guesswork. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

19 " Each falling tear carries pain and it's teh only way to get it out. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

20 " Each falling tear carries pain and it's the only way to get it out. "

― Adam S. McHugh , The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction