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Everything happens fast. Need news? Push a button. Need cereal? Order on Amazon. Need communication, look at your phone—it might just recognize your face, automatically unlock, and show you all of your notifications. Messengers, social media, phone calls—it flows like a flood. But the difference is that a flood ends while today’s communication never ends. 

We feel pressed into creating and communicating. In moments of stillness we think, Couldn’t you be doing something more productive? Friends want to know, What have you done for me lately? We have the freedom to do what we want, but society entices us to want to make, do, produce, or act. Doing is all. 

Then we wonder why Bible verses like “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10) don’t make a lot of sense to us. We sit still and wait. Then we wonder, yeah but for how long? I have stood here for one minute, ten now! What’s next? A Sunday service that goes longer than 75 minutes feels like an eternity, Don’t you know that I have something to do? 

The virtue of patience falls to the wayside. Paul says that the Spirit’s fruit is patience (Gal 5:22). We as a society don’t have it. Here is a simple way to prove the point. Have you ever felt like you could not find a friend who will really listen to you? You might have a couple, but you know how hard that is to find. 

But listening, as Byung-Chul Han notes, expresses itself as patience. To sit with someone without a phone or worry and just listen; to sit with someone and empty yourself of yourself and receive what someone says—that feels virtually impossible. 

Yet patient listening seems to be one of the most important ways to help and heal someone. A listening ear can bear their burdens. But it requires patience. It requires turning off the noise of hypercommunication. It requires giving of yourself to others. As Han notes, “Listening is a bestowal, a giving, a gift.”

Listening is a form of sacrifice because we put aside our worries, cares, and interests for the moment. And we focus on someone else’s. We bear their burdens. We carry their hardships. 

Listening is a form of patience. Or perhaps we can say listening looks like patience in practice. We have this great gift to give. But it might require an emptying of ourselves and a love for others that eliminates all thoughts of self. When we listen, we are not producing, we are not sharing our thoughts; we listen to others. 

It is a form of sacrifice because we put aside our worries, cares, and interests for the moment. And we focus on someone else’s. We bear their burdens. We carry their hardships. 

We enter into a stillness that no longer seems possible in a world where communication comes constantly and without barriers. We put that aside for the love of others. We listen because we are patient. We are patient because patience is the fruit of the Spirit. And so we do not conform ourselves to the world’s pattern of life, but we renew our minds daily to know what is good and right (Rom 12:2).

In this case, that means patience in listening.  

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