The Compassion in Listening

 

Dear Reader,

Tonight I was asked to chair an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on the subject of responsibility.

After offering a brief message, the meeting was opened for others to share their own experience, strength, and hope on that subject. As I listened to each member speak, I found myself impressed by another thought: my responsibility as a listener.

Later, I came across this reflection from Tiny Buddha:

“Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”

That thought stayed with me.

My experience in recovery, and especially as an AA sponsor, has taught me that communication is one of the building blocks of good relationships. What we say matters, and how we say it matters. Yet listening is just as important. Not merely listening to hear words, but listening to understand in a way that helps another person feel seen, heard, and valued.

This is what is often called empathetic listening.

To me, empathetic listening is where compassion stops being an idea and becomes an act. It is the quiet act of giving another person our attention without judgment, correction, comparison, or a prepared response. By becoming still and calm, we offer not only our ears, but our presence, our patience, and our willingness to understand the feelings that may lie beneath the words.

In that kind of listening, something changes within us. We move away from asking, “What should I say?” and toward saying, “Tell me more. I want to understand how you are.” In that moment, we offer a deeply healing message: “You matter. I am here. You are not alone.”

I believe this is more than a communication skill. It is a spiritual grace.

It is also, in a very real sense, a form of Christlike love.

The Savior was never in a hurry to overlook the one soul before Him. Again and again in the scriptures, He noticed people. He allowed them to speak. He understood their sorrow, their fear, their longing, and their faith. Before He taught, He often first made people feel known. Before He healed, He often first made them feel seen.

How many hearts were opened simply because Jesus gave them His attention?

How many lives were lifted because He responded not only to words, but to the deeper need of the soul?

When we listen with kindness, restraint, and love, we do something holy. We create a small space where another person may feel safe enough to tell the truth. And when truth is spoken in a place of mercy, healing can begin.

I am reminded of the counsel found in scripture to be “swift to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19). Those few words contain great wisdom. Sometimes our first responsibility is not to answer, but to hear. Not to instruct, but to understand. Not to speak over another person’s pain, but to sit beside them in it.

Returning to the meeting this evening, I realize now that by truly listening, I was also being taught. Each person who shared enlarged my understanding—not only of the subject, but of the person speaking and of what mattered to them. That kind of knowledge is seldom gained when my own mouth is open.

It is my hope as well that each person who spoke tonight felt, if only for a moment, that they were seen, heard, and not alone.

Listening and empathy have no script. Yet perhaps that is because love itself does not always begin with words. Sometimes it begins with attention. Sometimes it begins with silence. And sometimes it begins when one child of God is willing to listen to another with the compassion of Christ.

🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️

Do Not Judge the Journey Too Soon

 

Dear Reader,

This morning I received a text from a friend. It contained a simple greeting and a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”

Good morning 😊

As I often do, I found myself considering both the meaning and the source of those words.

The quotation comes from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. His counsel is simple, yet difficult:

“Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.”

He goes on to caution against looking backward too quickly with blame, recognizing that our past naturally has a part in everything that meets us today.

With the advantage of having lived through several very different stages of life, I find considerable wisdom in that thought.

In youth and early adulthood, life seemed much more immediate to me. When something happened, I often decided very quickly what it meant and what I should do about it. Just as quickly, I changed course based upon the emotions and circumstances of that particular moment.

I remember, for example, being caught up in the passion and excitement of a relationship and asking the person I was dating to marry me.

There was little serious thought about where we might live, what our responsibilities would become, or even what choices we might someday face concerning children and family.

Life was before me, and my attitude was little more than:

Hoist the sails and full speed ahead.

Only later would I discover that enthusiasm alone does not tell us where the currents are running.

Over the next six years, my wife and I experienced disappointments and difficult times. Eventually, our marriage ended.

At the time, I did not simply see the ending of a marriage.

I saw failure.

I believed that my life as a husband had failed, and the separation and divorce seemed only to confirm the permanence of that judgment.

For several years, I allowed that conclusion to define me.

I became convinced that the harbor of marriage was closed to me and that I would never enter it again.

Looking back today, I understand that period very differently.

Perhaps when we are young, we have not yet sailed enough waters to understand the currents carrying us.

A sudden storm can look like the end of the voyage when we have not yet learned that storms pass, winds change, and sometimes an unexpected current carries us toward a destination we could not yet see.

What I once saw only as failure eventually became a teacher.

With time, I matured.

I became more thoughtful about relationships, partnership, expectations, and what I truly valued in another person.

The ending of that first marriage changed what I thought I wanted and forced me to consider what I truly needed in a life partner.

It also taught me something about humility.

A lasting partnership requires more than passion. It requires patience, compromise, honesty, forgiveness, responsibility, and a willingness to adjust the sails when the wind changes.

Had I possessed then the maturity that experience eventually provided, I might not have charted the same course.

Yet without sailing those waters, I am not certain I would have recognized calmer and wiser waters when they later came into view.

This is where Rilke's words become more than poetry to me:

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.”

That requires reflection.

It requires patience.

And for me, it also requires faith and hope in a loving God.

The experience itself may never change, but with time, recovery, faith, and perspective, our understanding of it can.

Much of that understanding came to me through recovery and scripture.

One of the great lessons I have received through Alcoholics Anonymous is that there is a difference between examining the past and living in it.

Recovery asks us to be honest about yesterday.

We take inventory.

We acknowledge our wrongs.

We recognize where we may have caused harm.

And where possible, we make amends.

But recovery does not ask us to spend the remainder of our lives standing in yesterday's courtroom, repeatedly prosecuting ourselves for what has already been honestly faced.

At some point, we must learn from yesterday and return to the life before us.

We cannot sail today's waters while constantly staring over the stern.

Today is where I have the ability to choose what I will do next.

The Apostle Paul seems to have understood this when he wrote:

“Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,

I press toward the mark…”
— Philippians 3:13–14, KJV

Paul could not literally forget his past.

He knew what he had done.

He remembered the people he had persecuted.

But after encountering Christ, he refused to believe that his past had the authority to write the final chapter of his life.

That should speak powerfully to all of us.

It is what we do from this moment forward that helps determine our next course.

No matter our age—young or old—we still have some ability to adjust the rigging, turn the wheel, and respond to the winds that meet us.

We cannot control the sea.

We cannot command the wind.

But we can choose how we respond to them.

Paul gives us further reassurance:

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God…”
— Romans 8:28, KJV

I have come to appreciate what that scripture does not say.

It does not say that all things are good.

Some experiences are painful.

Some are consequences of choices we ourselves have made.

Some leave scars.

Some storms damage the ship.

Faith does not require us to pretend otherwise.

The promise is deeper:

God can work through all things.

Even the experiences that once brought shame can, when honestly faced and surrendered to God, eventually become experiences through which we better understand another human being.

The person who once needed a hand extended toward him may someday discover that his own hand has become the one being extended.

The person who once struggled to stay afloat may someday recognize someone else struggling in the same water.

Perhaps that is one of the unexpected gifts of recovery.

We do not erase where we have sailed.

We learn from it.

And sometimes God allows the difficult waters behind us to become the very experience that helps us guide another person through a storm.

Looking back over the years, I find that life is less like a collection of separate events and more like a long voyage.

There are calm seas.

There are violent storms.

There are changing winds.

There are hidden currents.

There are strange and unfamiliar ports.

There are moments when we lose our bearings.

And there are lighthouses—people, principles, scripture, recovery, and experiences of faith—that help us find our direction again.

That is why I return to Rilke's counsel:

Do not be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you.

There is freedom in that.

We are not required to understand every storm while we are still inside it.

We are not required to know where every current will eventually carry us.

We are asked to live faithfully today.

To honestly examine our part.

To make right what we can.

To learn.

To adjust the sails.

And then to continue.

The “what” we are struggling through today may make far more sense after we have sailed a few more miles and ridden a few more waves.

Perhaps faith is not believing that God will always give us calm seas.

Perhaps faith is trusting that He remains with us when the sea is not calm.

And perhaps wisdom comes when we finally realize that one difficult chapter—or one difficult stretch of water—does not define the entire voyage.

So I return once more to the thought that began this reflection:

Do not judge the journey too soon.

We have not yet seen what God may do with it.

Our task is not to demand a clear horizon.

It is to trust the One who can see beyond it.

Then we adjust the sails and continue—

one day at a time,
one choice at a time,
one wave at a time.

  🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️  

The Peace within Us

 

Good morning, Dear Reader,

Today I offer a reflection on two thoughts that at first seem to speak about different kinds of peace.

“Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”

—Marcus Aurelius

And

“We cannot buy our own peace of mind at the expense of others.”

—Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 84

Consider this: one thought turns us inward, while the other turns our attention toward those around us. Yet I believe they describe two sides of the same spiritual truth.

All too often I have believed that my personal peace would come if only something outside of me would change—if another person behaved differently, if a problem disappeared, if circumstances became easier, or if the past could somehow be rewritten.

Yet through lived experience, I have come to understand that life rarely grants me that kind of control.

So, as Marcus Aurelius reminds me, I must look elsewhere for the peace I seek.

In Recovery, I have discovered that within each of us there is a quiet place where we can examine our thoughts, surrender what we cannot change, and decide how we will respond to what life has placed before us.

In my case, prayer and meditation have become part of entering that quiet place.

It is there that I can ask:

·    What belongs to me?

·    What must I release?

·    What can I change?

·    What kind of person do I wish to be when I leave this quiet place and return to the world?

There is another important lesson here.

Inner peace cannot simply mean protecting myself from discomfort.

·    Sometimes what looks like peace is actually avoidance.

·    I might remain silent because speaking truth would be uncomfortable.

·    I might withdraw rather than make amends.

·    I might insist upon getting my own way because surrender feels too difficult.

It is entirely possible that I might even convince myself I am protecting my serenity while leaving someone else to carry the consequences of my actions.

This is where the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous becomes important:

We cannot purchase our own peace at another person’s expense.

True serenity does not require someone else to lose theirs.

The peace discovered within the soul should eventually appear in our relationships—with greater patience, honesty, forgiveness, humility, and a willingness to make things right.

Jesus taught:

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”

—Matthew 5:9, KJV

Notice that He did not simply bless those who possess peace. He blessed those who make peace.

I have come to accept that this begins with me.

When I enter the quiet sanctuary of the soul, I pray. I listen. I examine myself honestly. I allow God to straighten what has become confused within me. Then I carry that peace back into the world.

I try not to demand that others change so that I may be peaceful. Instead, I ask how my own words and actions might become instruments of peace.

I am learning that serenity is not isolation from other people.

It is learning to remain spiritually grounded while living among them.

The quiet retreat Marcus Aurelius describes is therefore not a place in which I hide from life.

It is a place where I prepare myself to return to life differently.

So I ask you, Dear Reader: Is the peace you seek meant only to quiet your own soul, or can the peace you discover within become peace offered to those around you?

If we choose the latter, then I believe we may be discovering something deeper than tranquility.

We may be discovering the peace Christ spoke of when He said:

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.”

—John 14:27, KJV

Perhaps that is the peace I am seeking—not simply freedom from disturbance, but the kind of peace that changes how I respond to others.

Peace begins within, but Christ asks me to carry it beyond myself.

And when I am uncertain how to do that, perhaps there remains one simple question worth asking:

“What would Christ do?”

The choice, ultimately, is ours. For my part, I choose the peace that comes from asking that question.

Living in Shadows: When What We Believe Keeps Us From What Is True

 

Dear Reader,

This morning I find myself reflecting on a human condition that, at one time or another, probably touches all of us.

Most of us have experienced being in a dark room, walking outside at night, or perhaps entering a cave where there is just enough light to see shapes around us.

In those moments, the mind can go to great lengths to make sense of what it sees.

A shadow becomes a person. A branch becomes something threatening. An unfamiliar shape becomes whatever our imagination tells us it might be.

That causes me to wonder:

Why do we sometimes prefer the shadow to the light?

Is it because fear has become familiar? Is it pride, resentment, belonging, or simply our desire to confirm something we already believe?

A shadow is not complete darkness. There is enough light for us to see—but not enough to see clearly.

Perhaps that is what makes shadows spiritually dangerous.

The danger of living in shadows is not that we cannot see at all. It is that we can see just enough to convince ourselves that we are seeing clearly.

I believe this can happen in life.

We see enough to form an opinion, make a judgment, develop a fear, or reach a conclusion about ourselves or someone else—yet we may not be seeing things as they really are.

Sometimes we live in shadows not because God's light is absent, but because something has come between us and the Light.

Fear can do that.

So can resentment, prejudice, pride, misinformation, rejection, and ideas repeated so often that we eventually stop questioning them.

Of particular concern are those things we desperately want to believe, things we are afraid might be true, and assumptions about ourselves that we have carried for years.

A falsehood does not have to be completely false to mislead us.

Sometimes the most convincing shadow contains just enough truth to appear real.

Recently I watched a CBS News discussion concerning claims about American elections. The political issue itself is not my purpose here. What caught my attention was something much broader: What happens when an assertion is repeated often enough that repetition begins to take the place of evidence?

There is nothing wrong with questioning an election, a government, an institution, a church leader, a news report, or something we have always been taught.

Questions can lead us toward truth.

But there is an important difference between asking:

“What does the evidence show?”

“How can I prove what I have already decided to believe?”

That distinction reaches far beyond politics.

And before I become too comfortable identifying the shadows in someone else's thinking, perhaps I need to examine my own.

What have I believed simply because it was repeated to me?

What have I accepted because everyone around me accepted it?

What conclusion have I reached because it made me comfortable?

And what belief have I refused to reconsider because changing my mind would require humility?

For me, recovery and faith have forced me to confront many such shadows.

There have been times when the shadows whispered:

I am beyond forgiveness.

My past defines who I am.

People cannot change.

God has forgotten me.

Because someone hurt me once, I cannot trust again.

If I admit I was wrong, I become less worthy.

If God really loved me, this would not have happened.

I have learned that we can spend years responding to a shadow as though it were reality.

Today, recovery, scripture, and God give me a different source of light.

Recovery has given me the light of sobriety and a new freedom.

Scripture has taught me something about the nature of truth:

“And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.”
—Doctrine and Covenants 93:24

I especially pause over four words:

“Things as they are.”

Not necessarily as I want them to be.

Not simply as someone told me they are.

Not as fear tells me they are.

Not even as my political party, social group, religious community, or favorite commentator tells me they are.

Things as they are.

But truth requires something from us.

It requires humility.

Sometimes light reveals things we would rather not see.

Truth may require me to say:

I was mistaken.

I judged someone unfairly.

The story I have been telling myself is incomplete.

Someone I trusted was wrong.

Or perhaps hardest of all:

I was wrong.

Changing our minds when greater truth becomes available is not weakness.

It can be an act of integrity.

Spiritually, it may also be an act of humility.

This brings me to Jesus Christ.

He did not simply tell us where light might be found.

He said:

“I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
—John 8:12

“I am the light.”

Our search for truth, therefore, is about more than collecting correct information.

It is learning to see ourselves, other people, and the world through Christ.

Through honesty.

Through humility.

Through mercy.

Through love.

And through truth.

There is something else interesting about a shadow.

A shadow can exist only because somewhere there is light.

Perhaps discovering that we have been living beneath a shadow is not cause for despair.

Perhaps it means the Light is beginning to reach us.

We do not need to spend our lives defending every belief we have ever held.

Nor do we have to be frightened when truth asks us to reconsider something.

We simply keep moving toward the Light.

So today I ask myself:

What shadow might I still be living in?

What belief have I never seriously examined?

Am I willing to ask God to show me not merely what I want to see—but what is true?

And when truth challenges something I have long believed:

Will I defend the shadow, or will I follow the Light?

Jesus offered this promise:

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
—John 8:32

Perhaps we do not have to spend our lives fighting every shadow.

Sometimes we simply need to turn toward the Light.

And as we draw nearer to Christ, what frightened us in the shadows may look very different in the light.

May God bless and keep you.

 🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️  

Spiritual sight beyond what the Eye can See

“Lord, help me not merely to look, but to see.”

Dear Reader,

Today I offer an observation from Henry David Thoreau that has stayed with me:

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

At first, I took those words simply as a reminder to look more carefully. But the longer I considered them, the more I began to see a spiritual meaning within them. There is a difference between having eyesight and having insight.

The Savior once asked:

“Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?”
—Mark 8:18, KJV

Christ was speaking to people who could physically see what was happening around them. Their difficulty was not with their eyes. It was with understanding. They were looking, yet they were not fully seeing.

As I continued thinking about this, I found myself drawn to the Book of Mormon, where Jacob teaches that the Spirit “speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be.” —Jacob 4:13

That verse changed the direction of my thinking. The gospel does not merely tell us where to look. Through the Spirit, we can learn to see more truthfully—to see beyond appearances, assumptions, fear, resentment, disappointment, and even our own limited understanding.

The story of the brass serpent teaches something similar. The people of Israel had been given a way to be healed: they needed to look. Alma later reminded his son that “if they would look they might live,” and then gave the simple counsel, “look to God and live.” —Alma 37:46–47

Sometimes what we need is already before us. The difficulty may be that we have not yet learned how to see it.

Elder Kim B. Clark, in his October 2015 general conference message “Eyes to See and Ears to Hear,” taught that through the Holy Ghost we can receive spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear. As that spiritual capacity grows, we begin to see the Savior working in our lives more clearly and to see ourselves, other people, and the world more as He sees them.

That thought has become personal for me.

In my own life, I have spent a great deal of time looking—at people, circumstances, disappointments, memories, and missed opportunities. There were times when I believed I understood what I was seeing. Looking back, I realize that disappointment, resentment, fear, and even pride sometimes colored my vision.

With spiritual sight, I am learning not merely to see what stands before me, but to ask what God may be teaching me through it.

An inconvenience can become a lesson.

An enemy can become a suffering soul in need of a friend.

A loss can, through grace, become the beginning of something new.

This does not mean that spiritual sight causes us to deny pain or pretend that every circumstance is pleasant. It means that we begin to ask a different question: What might God see here that I am not yet seeing?

A person in addiction may look at his life and see ruin, while God sees a soul who can still be restored.

A person burdened by guilt may look inward and see only failure, while Christ sees one for whom He has already made atonement.

A weary disciple may look at the road ahead and see only hardship, while God sees how endurance is quietly shaping a saint.

And someone we have judged harshly may appear very different when we begin to wonder what burdens that person is carrying and how the Savior might see him or her.

How often do we ask God to change our circumstances, when what we may need just as much is for Him to change our sight?

I believe that is the quiet invitation hidden inside Thoreau’s words.

The question is not only: What are you looking at?
The deeper question is: What are you seeing?

To see rightly is a gift. It comes through humility, honesty, and the quiet influence of the Spirit. It comes as the heart softens. It comes when we become willing to let God teach us what is truly before us.

The world before us may not change nearly as quickly as the heart within us. But when the heart is touched by God, even familiar things can begin to shine with a different meaning.

Sometimes the greatest miracle is not that something new appears before our eyes, but that at last, by grace, we truly see.

Thank you for your time. I invite you to leave a comment: What can you see differently today?

🙏  🧘‍♂️  💕  🤗  ☮️