Dear Reader:

As I continue my learning voyage into my 2017 perfect word “listen”…I realize that one of the most important and endearing gestures we can give each other …is the gift of simply leaning in and listening. 

Think back on your own childhood and adolescence…wasn’t your favorite person in the family or circle of close peers or adult friends… the one who listened, intently, to you and gave you the feeling that he/she really cared about your thoughts and dreams, to the exclusion of everything else going around?

It might have been a parent, sibling, cousin, teacher, coach, or friend…but you knew that person was really listening because they leaned into you, stared you straight back in the eye, and then took time to digest your words, thoughts,  problems, or dreams before responding.

My favorite aunts and uncles were the ones who treated (or pretended to anyway) me like an adult, an equal, no matter what my chronological age at the time…nothing was too trivial, silly, or unimportant to them. They listened as if I were discussing brain surgery instead of, perhaps, hurt feelings from an acquaintance who might have made fun of me.

Leaning in is the forerunner or conclusion to letting others lean on us when difficult times arrive.

A year ago Christmas when Brooke and I went to visit her son, Henry, in NYC we went to see the NYC Rockettes for a Christmas performance . One of the most popular, highlighted acts (that everyone waits for) is the march where dancers, dressed up like wooden soldiers,  slowly fall backwards…each one leaning on the one behind her until the whole line is on the floor in perfect precision…like decked cards.

In a perfect world we would all have someone to ‘cover our backs’… to have someone to lean on at just the precise moment we need them. And we do …God.

This would be the same person who would also lean in to listen to our troubles and quietly reassure us that we will find the right path again…we just need to be quiet and listen for directions.

As a teacher I could always tell when I had my students’ listening attention (to the story I was telling) when I saw them shove everything off their desk, prop their elbows on the desk with their hands cupped under their chins…leaning in towards me. “Gotcha” I thought to myself…it is going to be a good day!

In the children’s sermon yesterday….the favorite listening game (sometimes called “gossip”) where a message is repeated from child to child until the last child repeats what he/she heard…was played. It never turns out to be the same message, or original thought, of course, that started with the first child. The idea behind this game is to re-enforce how difficult it is to get everyone on the same line of communication…particularly if we aren’t listening.

Our pastor, Jeff Kackley, talked to the congregation yesterday about the “growing pains” we are experiencing, one of which is communication, as the church grows. He reiterated several times that we must remember the building we worship in is simply an architectural  edifice…we, the people, are the church. 

This remark set my connective neurons a’buzzing. By the time I got home I knew what and where it was …the connection I was looking for. I found it in Archibald Rutledge (SC Poet Laureate) most popular book...Home by the River.

After Archibald Rutledge retired and returned home to Hampton Plantation many of his black childhood companions, he grew up with, hunting and fishing, were now sharecropping the land around the plantation. They were there now to help Rutledge try to restore as much of the plantation as possible.

Rutledge, wrote in a later book, God’s Children, that these friends taught him more about pure faith and what true religion looks and sounds like than anyone else he ever met.

Being driven to accomplish as much as possible in the time he had left restoring Hampton, Rutledge sometimes got irritated with his friends for what he saw as dawdling or simply not finishing projects. Once, again, it was one of his old friends who showed him the simple truth.

For years there was a little church in the woods outside Hampton where the ex-slaves and now sharecroppers worshiped. For as long as Rutledge could remember the church had always been a work in progress. Finally it was almost complete…the only thing left to build was the top spire to finish the church. Months, then years went by and no spire.

Finally in exasperation, Rutledge decided to have a talk with Anthony Lee, the patriarch of the plantation congregation. It went like this:

“One day I was lamenting to old Anthony Lee, the patriarch of the plantation flock, the fact that his people had never finished the spire on their little church after all this time.

“Ah, Cap’n,” he said penetrantly, unmoved by my concern, “here is the true temple.” He pointed to his heart.

Rutledge remembered that conversation for years…the beauty of simple faith…the true faith…the true temple.

So until tomorrow…Let us all lean in and listen to our Creator…He has the best stories around.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

* I really am so happy that my last “child” is getting married. Didn’t you dread those years when the children were out of college and mostly by themselves…still hadn’t found their “one” so every time you texted your child and didn’t get a response (listening intently for the “ping”) or had a late night call I got the mother nightmare flashbacks… what terrible thing had happened….did your imagination go there…mine did! 🙂