Some conversations are just less interesting than others. The simple facts of a person’s day—the route to work, the morning snack, the spilled coffee—are not interesting unless they reveal something about the person who lived those details. In the same way, prayer requests about a distant, sick aunt can be boring unless we know something about the aunt and her place in that person’s life. Human beings want to know people. The details help when they reveal what is important to the speaker. Here is the task: How can we redirect a conversation that seems terminally superficial so we see the person in front of us?
There are at least two preconditions for this question. One is that we recognize that our daily conversations are the basic stuff of God’s kingdom, and we hope to be increasingly skilled in them. A second precondition is that we actually care about the other person. If we are bored or impatient, we are not loving well and will have no interest in knowing the person or working on deeper conversations. Love is creative in how it both asks questions and listens; boredom and impatience are simply waiting for a lull so they can
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