Communicating Means Listening, Too

The pastor at the church I attend has quite a gift with public speaking. His sermons are at the same time witty and profound, balancing well the religious message he is trying to convey with his personal life experiences. A lot of times I come out of there saying that he did a great job of communicating what he was trying to express. But not too long ago, I had a personal experience with him that gave me pause for reflection.

This pastor, who is about my age, had decided to train to run in the Sarasota Half-Marathon that was held in March earlier this year. He and an associate pastor in the church were quite public about what they were going to do (neither had run a half-marathon before), and the a.p. actually incorporated it into one of his own sermons. Well, I had thought at first that the half-marathon that they were going to run in would naturally be the LifeSouth Five Points race held right here in Gainesville on February 14. A race, incidentally that I had trained to run (and did). So when that day came and went without any sign of my two religious acquaintances, I wondered whether they might have skipped out. But no, they had decided to run in Sarasota instead. Fine, I thought, maybe I'll have the chance to "compare notes" about our experiences someday.

When that day came, it was after church and the pastor walked out and, noticing me standing there with my two children, walked over to warmly greet me. That's when I brought up his half-marathon race and asked him how it went for him. But he was very terse and quickly let himself be distracted by someone else. In mid-conversation. I was left feeling like someone who had just been insulted. And then it hit me.

If you know you have a more-or-less captive audience for a specific block of time (like with Sunday sermons), then you can plan elaborately textured speeches that leave the listeners impressed with your abilities. But most of the time, you are in informal situations where it can be a struggle to hold someone's attention for more than just a few seconds. It is not your fault that people don't have the courtesy or attention span to hear out your ideas; it is more due to their bad habits as poor, selfish, and inattentive listeners. In that stunted after-church "conversation" with the pastor, his discourteous behavior cast a shadow on the subsequent times I sat through his sermons; if he won't listen to me for a couple of minutes, why does he think I should listen at all to him?

So from now on, when I hear that someone is a great "communicator", I understand that this usually means that they have a good speaking delivery and methodology. But to truly warrant that kind of praise, the great speaker also needs to be a great listener. And I have discovered that, in spite of the relative scarcity of good speakers, there are even fewer good listeners, my proud running pastor included.