Am I hearing you correctly?

I think all of us want to know why people say and do what they do. We like to have an opinion about what’s going on and don't want to merely shrug our shoulders and say, “it's a mystery to me.”  We don't want to look as dumb as we feel! We have answers for the complex issues related to our employment but can’t tell you why our kids won’t behave.

Sometimes we understand the implications of pronouncements made by heads of government, yet at the same time we can't give an answer as to why we always feel tired and lethargic after being with some people that just have that draining effect on us.

Even though we understand that there really isn’t a wide diversity of human behavior, why is it that we don't spend much energy in learning to understand what makes others say and do things? 

I believe that if we are truly honest with ourselves, we are not very interested in understanding others; however, we are very interested in being understood!

This is a major problem for human communication, or the lack of it: We simply are not hearing others because we want to be heard. Paul’s advice in Ephesians 2:3-5 is to “count others as more significant than ourselves.” This requires us to put on a different kind of mind: The mind of Christ.