The Loving Fellowship

“Ear drops!”

In recent years people have become, generally speaking, cold and distant. It seems they want to receive and consume more than they would like to share. Everything is so self-centred and goes beyond selfishness. It is an ignorant selfish self-love. Rather sad and with an empty echo inside their hearts and minds. It is like nothing can resound with them. It seems to me their ears are closing when the message doesn’t touch their right chords.

It might seem odd to say this, but it is the reality to come. We will soon speak to death ears, shout at closed hearts, and sing to empty souls. This is a personal and rather general description of today’s society. However, where do we stand as Christians? Have we become insensitive and stone-hearted when our brothers and sisters are just talking?

I was young and carefully listening to a sermon once, and it amazed me to hear and realize what the preacher was saying. I actually had to take a moment and think upon the statement and I have concluded in the end, it is true. There is a quite distinctive difference between hearing and listening. That sermon message was about God hearing our prayers and actually listening to them. People hear all sorts of things today and our dwelling environment is actually flooded by noise. It is so much, that is tiring and rather overwhelming. I was recently walking and made me think, by observing people around me, I can rarely see a person jogging or walking to pick up their kid from school without head phones or ear buds. We are stopping the Creator to reveal His greatness through the harmony that is out there. Unfortunately, this would be another subject to discuss.

“I am all ears!”

Do we listen when we are engaged in a conversation? Do we listen? Scrolling through my Facebook page, I dropped over a great saying. “Listen to understand.” It seems a puerile sentence, but is it? We ought to understand clearly and comprehend deeply the difference between hearing and listening. We ought to run the extra mile to differentiate what listening to understand means.

Mostly, I have noticed in my life, that I hear people, sometimes I listen to them and rarely I listen to understand them. This requires having an empathic heart and mind. And if we want to have the whole picture, we should even put ourselves in the shoes of the speaker. Only then we would be able to have fruitful conversations with our saved peers. Otherwise, is just noise which in the end will be disturbing and rather tiring.

The Bible seriously emphasizes how close God is to the human. It is closer than we can comprehend it. God through Jesus Christ was a human and lived and experienced all the challenges and troubles and bad things we go through every day. He went beyond that and in the end laid His life, willingly. It is an extraordinary thing Jesus had done.

If God is so close to us, hearing and listening to all the whispers of our hearts. He understands them and gives us the comfort and assurance, that whatever we put on his shoulders, He will sort out to our best interest on earth and for eternity as well. To live in a pleasant fellowship, I would like to suggest we ought to exercise our listening. So that we can, after that, practice what we have listened to, being fully understood. So that our answer is comforting and loving. “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32

I encourage you to admit, at least in privately, that we do have this issue. Not listening to properly understand. Or when we talk, we are only using the ears, and the heart and mind are somewhere else. Or it may also be that even our ears sometimes, or probably often, are deaf. When we talk to God, there is silence. When we talk, there is noise coming and going and its echo is hurting us. We do not know how to stay in silence and just listen, engaging our hearing into listening and into understanding.

“That is dissonant!”

I felt some pain once and I hope it will go away soon. Yet it lasted and lasted and lasted for a while. So that in the end, I would learn the lesson God was teaching me. Now that the sadness of the countenance is gone, the heart has been comforted and I have understood what was the instruction I had to apply. It also made me realize, as a bonus, that pain persists for as long as we do not accept God’s instruction. For as long as we constrain our will to follow the Lord’s teaching, the sadness on our faces will keep tormenting our hearts. The moment we give in to God’s teaching, the pain goes away, the heart is refreshed and get to see and listen to the world, refreshed and more mature. The amazing God we have and how He straightens our path is such a great and miraculous work!

But I have realized moments after, that the lesson God has taught me would be rather simple and yet a complicated thing to do. Since it is not done and practised with skill. Nowadays, secular society claims we should be tolerant and inclusive. Which in reality, it means complying with the rules to be included. Otherwise, you are excluded. And so far we have seen more people being excluded than included in the new ideologies that fly around.

The Bible teaches us to be tenderhearted and forgiving one another. To accept my peer the way he is and not complain about his faults. A lesson which when fully understood, directed my life to a path I have never walked before. Do we know what it means to actually accept our fellow brothers and sisters? To love them as Jesus did? In Proverbs 17:9 we read: “He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends.” Don’t we often practice the opposite of this? And is sad to witness it, and bitter to live it.

In our church and in the small fellowship gatherings we seek to be accepted, but without accepting. We want others to live up to our faults and yet not share the favour. We want others to change for us, and not us for them. That is selfish and only seeking to separate. We ought to aim to be accepted by accepting other people’s flaws. Covering their defects with our love and understanding that I am a sinner. God is teaching us to give first without expecting anything in return, however, we request without even thinking of giving something in return. What a bargain trade!

Love will always seek to love more. Love is seeking the benefit of the other’s, first. Love is a proven deed. God has first accepted us, then paid the price. He had united me with Him when there was no intent for me to be under His loving guidance. God had fully accepted me and the things he wants out of my life is to bring better traits, so I can enjoy more His company. As humans, we fail to do so. We should individually reflect on the reasons. However, we force people to accept us so that we can be happy. The only effort some people put into a relationship is to be forcefully accepted by others. That is a sorrowful pain which stomps the heart.

Perhaps we can conclude where we are on the faith path, by checking the personal entourage and the fellowship I can have with my brothers and sisters. Whatever feelings may flood your heart and eyes, are only felt by you. From the outside, it can only be seen the sad face and social isolation, if applicable. Nonetheless, the pain is for you to deal with and affirm that by accepting you will be accepted. Those who make the first step are not brave, or humble, it is seeking for charity.