God's Whisper
I used to think that conversation was all about talking. To "con-verse" means "to speak words with." Two people speak words with each other, and that’s conversation. Some time ago it began to dawn on me that if two people did nothing more than speak words with each other, there might not be a lot of communication going on. Someone needs to be on the receiving end of the words. And so I grew to understand that conversation was made up of two parts: speaking and listening. Ideally, each participant in the dialogue would do both. Give and take, fifty-fifty, like in a good marriage. I learned this important truth, but it took me a while longer to put it into practice. In conversations with friends, though I was careful not to talk more than my fifty percent, I wasn’t so good about listening the other fifty. I’d be making eye contact and nodding intelligently but my mind was usually on the future—what I was preparing to say during my upcoming 50% talk time. I’m a slow le...