OK, OK, before you all get the wrong idea, I don't go to bars, mainly because I don't drink. No this blog will not be about the need to drink alcohol, although I do have views on it I do not find them important enough to talk about today, or any day really. What I do want to talk about is communication.
I sat down to have some tasty Mexican food with a friend a short while ago and we were having a good conversation. After awhile we started talking about my feeling that in my position as a pastor there are certain things that I believe that I do not feel I can talk about. My friend essentially responded that while I may not be able to talk about it I can talk about it.
To be honest for a second I was fairly dense and didn't really get what he was talking about. Luckily though my brain caught up to the conversation and I was able to understand what he meant. You see, while I may not feel that I am able to say 'x' if you follow my comments to their full extent you should be able to arrive at how I feel on certain subjects. The words I choose and the scriptures I focus on have the ability to say a lot more than what the sentences and paragraphs I use say on first listen.
It got me thinking that a lot of our communication is kind of like that old game/exercise telephone. Do you know/remember telephone? If not the long and the short of it is that people would get in a line or a circle or a square, which is a rectangle, even though not every rectangle is a square, and then the teacher/first person would say something to the next. The next person was to relay exactly what they had been told to the next person, and it would continue all the way down the line. Inexplicably by the time the group was done the statement/story was completely different than when it started.
Very often our communication looks like that, especially the really long speeches that we call sermons. I can't tell you how often I have felt like I have given the worst sermon of my life and someone will always come up an say how that sermon really spoke to them. The same is also true sometimes I have felt that I have given the worlds greatest sermon and walked away and no one says word one, or worse there has been a time when I have preached the greatest sermon ever and someone told me, 'don't worry you do a lot better usually.' Ugh.
I'm not sure why we continue to think that the lecture is the best way to communicate God's message to the masses, but we do. Though, as I said earlier most of our communication resembles that old game. Just ask yourself how many times you have read something on Facebook and got so angry only to realize that you read it wrong to begin with.
I think that part of our problem is that we go into communication with so many preconceived notions. We talk to person 'a' with the understanding that they are our friends and so we expect our conversations to go one way, and sooner or later they go another way. Or we talk to person 'b', who we think is stupid and at some point they say something so profound it knocks us on our rear. We go in with ideas of what will happen and we are thrown when thing go sideways, even if it is a good sideways.
Then there are other times in our communication when the thoughts in our heads combat the words that are coming from the other persons mouth. We are stuck in our own worlds when we should be interacting with the world around us. You know exactly what I mean, you've had a bad day and can't get your own problems off your mind and someone comes up to you to talk. Or perhaps you've been hard at work all day on this project that you just can't seem to grasp and you come home and your spouse expects you to be present, yet you're still sitting at your desk in your head.
In other words, so often we go through life with too few bars to have a proper conversation. Instead of 4G, we end up showing up in our extended network with our roaming data turned off. We want to download what the other person has to say but we've reached our monthly data download limit. Do you get my drift yet? We are cellphones with busy signals. Sorry I couldn't stop without just one more.
We need more bars, we need to stop the internal conversation so that we can focus on the external ones. We need to stop coming to the party assuming how it will play out. We need to open ourselves up to those around us so that out lives will be fuller and more meaningful.
And maybe, just maybe we need to rethink the whole concept of a sermon, but that is a blog for another day/month/year.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
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