Listening

Back where I come from the town is small and the ties run deep.

Friendships are made on playgrounds in Kindergarten and often carry through to adulthood. Such is the case with me anyway.

I'm sitting here watching my boy play the day away with his buddies and I can't help but wonder what bonds are being made over bike rides and dips in the pool.

Some of the little girls that I played hop scotch with at recess in elementary school are the same ones that were bridesmaids at my wedding. We grew up, got married and carried our children through pregnancy and infancy together. We also had to learn, as anyone else who is among the living, how to get each other through some hard times.

And more often than not that meant not knowing what in the world to say, so we got really good at listening over time.

Such was the case when recently a lifelong friend and I were talking our way through the feeling of  a lack of productivity that is often accompanied with the young years of motherhood.

I say feeling of with emphasis because that's exactly what it is. A feeling.  While we rely heavily on them, our feelings can sometimes be a far off illusion of the truth. While I desperately wanted to be able to bust out in a monologue that would bring any woman out of the throes of depression-the truth is that I just wasn't sure I had them.

So I sat and I listened.

I waited and nodded my head in humble understanding because the truth of the matter is that I've spent some time there myself. In that mode of wondering if the days that sometimes seem so long and unstructured are producing anything good.

It's a good breeding ground for discouragement in that space of time where loneliness meets monotony. One load of dishes after another, one load of laundry after another and it can all start to feel a bit less than the glorious making of something wonderful than it is.

I know this to be true because I've lived it.

And let me tell you the last thing I wanted to hear on any given day of a worthless feeling was someone to tell me how to get out of it.

No-what I needed was a good ear to hear me out. Because I think that the Lord puts deep inside of us a longing to reckon with Him about the way we spend our days and the way we feel our worth.

If I spend too much time talking and pitching in an opinion where I'm not even sure it's warranted? Then I risk talking over Him.

I've learned a beautiful thing while talking to my sister over the years. Sometimes we'll call each other, one of us with a big problem pressing to the front of our mind. Most of the time what I've recognized is that neither of us necessarily needs a great amount of advice from the other.

Usually just laying it all out there in the open air is enough. Before you know it, just stating the problem begins to start the working of a solution without even so much as another opinion.

Sometimes truth shines through like a radiant light when someone takes the time to close their mouth and turn their ear to listen.