The Listening Life

Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award Logos Association Bookstore Award Bookwi.se's Favorite Books of the Year Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year "Be quick to listen, slow to speak." —James 1:19 How would our lives change if we approached every experience with the intention of listening first? In this noisy, distracting world, it is difficult to truly hear. People talk past each other, eager to be heard but somehow deaf to what is being said. Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life. Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission in the world. God himself is the God who hears, and we too can learn to hear what God may be saying through creation, through Scripture, through people. By cultivating a posture of listening, we become more attentive and engaged with those around us. Listening shapes us and equips us to be more attuned to people in pain and more able to minister to those in distress. Our lives are qualitatively different—indeed, better—when we become listeners. Heed the call to the listening life, and hear what God is doing in you and the world.

Listening is an essential skill for healthy relationships, both with God and with other people. But it is more than that: listening is a way of life. Adam McHugh places listening at the heart of our spirituality, our relationships and our mission. Heed the call to the listening life, and hear what God is doing in you and the world.

Daily meditations taken from the works of an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and preacher who has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations.

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The Christian life is a life of listening. In this memoir, lifelong minister of the gospel Leighton Ford tells his story as a personal history of listening for God’s voice. Beginning with his earliest memories, he recounts the different ways God has spoken to him, and the different ways he has learned to listen. Through the joys of ministry, first as an international evangelist, often in partnership with Billy Graham, and later as a leader of the Lausanne Movement and a mentor of emerging leaders, he remembers God's voice proclaiming, instructing, reassuring. Through the pain of deep loss, he remembers God's voice calling out to him, even in the deafening silence. What emerges is not just an account of a long and faithful life of Christian service, but a picture of the Christian life—the life of listening. What will it sound like, Ford asks, when God speaks to you?

What is this fleeting experience that sometimes hits us when we listen to music? Through several short essays adapted from lectures given at Vanderbilt University between 2008 and 2012, author Joshua McGuire answers this question while exploring what it takes to become better listeners of music. McGuire's premise is that listening to music in a fuller way shows us a fuller way to live, clarifying the way we listen to everything. Ironically, better listening involves a recognition of the absence of time experienced amidst profound silence. After all, the purpose of music is to bring us to silence. “As we listen, we become the silence in which music happens. We disappear.”

This book addresses the role listening plays in our personal and professional lives, and provides steps we can take to strengthen our own listening skills. Each chapter was written specifically for this book with the intention of introducing the reader to the major theories that affect the processes of listening, and to the impact of listening behavior on our own ability to be effective communicators. Contents: Forward, Ralph Nichols; Preface, Deborah Borisoff and Michael Purdy; Introduction: Why Listening? Deborah Borisoff and Michael Purdy; PART I: Processes and Contexts of Listening; What is Listening?, Michael Purdy; Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Listening: Self Listening and Conscious Action, Michael Purdy; Gender and Listening: Values Revalued, Deborah Borisoff and Dan Hahn; Intercultural Listening, Dean Thomlison; Managing Interpersonal and Team Conflict: Listening Strategies, Patrice Johnson, and Kittie Watson; The New Digital Presence: Listening, Access, and Computer-Mediated Life, Rob Anderson; Listening as an Indiscreet Public Act or Eavesdropping Can Be Fun, Gary Gumpert and Susan J. Drucker; PART II: Listening in the Professions; Listening in the Educational Environment, Carolyn Coakley and Andrew Wolvin; Listening Training: The Key to Success in Today's Organizations, Lyman K. Steil; Listening in the Service Industries: It Makes Good Cents, Judi Brownell; Listening and the Helping Professions, William Arnold; The Lawyer-Client Encounter: Listening for Facts and Relationship, David A. Victor and Cindy Rhodes Victor; Listening: A Crucial Competency for Effective Health Care Delivery, Gary Krepd, Ellen Bonaguro, and Jim Query; Listening in Journalism: All the News We've Heard About That's Fit to Print, Rob Anderson and Mike Killenberg; PART III: Conclusion; Steps to Strengthen Listening Ability, Deborah Borisoff and Michael Purdy; About the Contributors.