Your Story Matters – Are You Listening?

“Listen. Listen deeply.”

“This is the word You want me to focus on this year, Lord? I thought I was listening. After all, it’s the first word in my mission statement! You want me to go even deeper? Deeper than studying hard to teach the ladies at church? I try to understand the biblical characters’ cultures, emotions, needs, desires, and sins and apply them to myself and to the ladies. What more is there to listen to?”

In March, I received the path that God wants me to take to listen deeply.

Your Story Matters: Finding, Writing, and Living the Truth of Your Life, by Leslie Leyland Fields, provides the winding, sometimes circling, uphill, downhill path God is taking me on as I listen more deeply than I ever have.

Continue reading Your Story Matters – Are You Listening?

Are You Listening?

“Listen. Can you hear the note hang in the air as the next note is played?”

Squinted eyes. Frowning face.

“Listen again. It’s as if I’m connecting the notes as a complete thought – a sentence. One note joins the next to produce a new meaning. Do you hear it?”

“Cool!”

“Wasn’t that beautiful?”

Smiling nod.

“That’s legato … a complete thought … a complete moment.”

It took several attempts, but my 9-year-old student learned how to listen a little deeper for the connections between the notes in a legato phrase.

Deep listening connects thoughts and emotions to understand the moment's meaning and beauty. Click To Tweet Read more

Resolved: Listen Deeply … 5 Strategies

Texts, emails, phone calls, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, television, radio, calendar, to-do lists, traffic, never-ending meetings. Do these intrusions make up a good part of your day? Could they be interfering with the important things in your life?

In 2019, the word “busyness” described a good part of my life.

Resolved.

Continue reading Resolved: Listen Deeply … 5 Strategies