Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to a live recording from
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Westside Church in Bend, Oregon.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming. I'm one of the senior pastors here at Westside. We are in week three of talking about healthy relationships. Really simply, we believe that healthy relationships aren't just, you know, good for us interpersonally or good for us in friendships and marriages and in the workplace, but they're actually gospel work. That engaging in healthy relationships, learning to understand yourself, how God sees you, and understanding others is gospel work. And it is Christian work. And so we're trying to jump into this and equip each other to be able to do this really well. And one of the worst parts of my job, if you don't know, is that I actually have to participate in so many of the things that I preach.
And today we're talking about the importance of listening inside of relationships. And, boy, I've been prepping for this for a couple weeks. And then just Tuesday, my wife and I had a argument.
And I think three times in the middle of it. I don't even think she knew what I was preaching on. She said, you're not listening. And I was like, oh, gotta fix this before Sunday, you know? Cause there's nothing better than preaching a message and having your wife sit in the front row and just go.
So she'll be at the 11 if you want to, you know, watch her.
Listening is important, right? And I think we all know there's a difference between hearing someone, listening to the audio of someone's voice in a room and actually listening to someone.
And it's so important that David Augsberger said it like this. He said, being heard is so close to being loved for the average person that they are almost indistinguishable.
Again, being heard is so close to being loved for the average person. They're almost indistinguishable.
And so we hear all kinds of things all day long, right? You maybe hear your spouse talking while we're thinking about what you need to do next. Or maybe you're hearing your kids while you're looking at your phone. You hear a co worker explain something while you're already preparing your response in advance.
And a lot of times I've noticed that, for me, what I'm internally thinking, when somebody is talking, I'm going, I know. I know what you need to do.
Or that's not quite right and you're getting it a little off. Or let me tell you what happened to me. That's one of My favorite things.
I don't know if you realize, but I love talking.
And so a lot of listening is like, okay, we're gonna get to talk here in just a second. It's gonna be great.
I'm gonna tell my own stories.
And I think this is actually one of the reasons that Jesus was so compelling to people, that for someone who could have just spent all of his time talking, and certainly Jesus talked and taught a lot. Jesus was an incredible listener. He had this extraordinary ability not to just hear the sound of somebody's voice, but then to help someone feel seen. And oftentimes people that hadn't been seen in a long time.
He didn't necessarily agree with everyone, right. And he didn't affirm what every single person he believed in that. That he encountered across the path. And he didn't necessarily give every single person what they wanted, but he did make them feel seen. And he noticed people that other people would have the tendency to walk past, and he asked them questions, and he allowed them to tell their stories.
I wonder if this isn't a way that we could better move through the world of paying attention to the world around us so that it may feel seen instead of dominated by us and our faith.
And so when we look carefully at the life of Jesus, one of the things that I want you to discover today is that Jesus listened a bit differently than most of us do. A lot of times we listen in order to respond. I don't think I'm the only one in the room that does that. He shows us this other way, and I believe he shows us this really well in John chapter four.
And I'm going to bounce around on the story a little bit just to kind of pick up the pace. But John chapter four is this story that's about this woman that Jesus meets at a well.
And so John tells us that it says now he had to go through Samaria, which was not very comfortable for Jewish people at the time. You didn't want to hang out with Samaritans. And so Jesus arrives at this town called Sychar, and he sits down beside a well. It's noon at the heat of the day, and a Samaritan woman comes to draw water.
And Jesus wants us to immediately understand how crazy this conversation is, right? She's a Samaritan. Jesus is Jewish. She's a woman. Jesus is a man. These things, these details tell us that these two people should not be spending time and communicating with one another in this context.
And based on the details that we learn in the story, not only is she a Samaritan woman, but she has a bit of a social stigma around her personal life and her own community. And so Jesus has every single right at this point to just completely ignore her and walk past her and blow her off. But instead, Jesus speaks and he says a question. He says, will you give me a drink?
Notice how this conversation begins.
Jesus, who of course knows everything about this woman already at this moment, he doesn't jump into a sermon or a correction of her, and he doesn't begin by telling her everything that's wrong with her life. Instead, he begins with a question. She's surprised that he would even address him in the first place. And she says, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman and why would you ask me for a drink? But then the conversation continues to unfold and a lot of the conversation is one sided in which she is making comment to Jesus about all kinds of things. They talk about water, they talk about thirst, they talk about worship, they talk about relationships, they talk about God, and they talk about the Messiah.
Now it's interesting because Jesus could have shut down the conversation pretty quick. Like, I coach flag football. Flag football's coming up, the Parks and Rec league and we'll go Chargers, I think, this year.
And I've coached my son's team ever since he was in first grade.
And what I've noticed every single year, because I have almost the same group of kids every single time, is that in a game, if a couple plays go wrong in a row, the huddle will become a mutiny against the coach.
And like one or two plays that I've called and they go, you know what we gotta do? We gotta throw a Hail Mary. Why aren't we just throwing it?
Can I throw it? Can he throw it? Can you throw it to me? Can you throw it to him? And I look at these little punks and you know what I do?
I do not listen at all.
This is not some democracy.
I'm not interested in your thoughts or your opinions. We're trying to annihilate the third graders on the other side of the field. And so if you know it's good for you, you'll trust the game plan. You'll shut your little mouths and you'll run the plays how I call them. You think something's going wrong because of the play call, it's because you have butterfingers.
And after all this time of me telling you you don't know the difference between a post and a flag, this is your fault.
You know, in my little kingdom of flag football, I'm the expert, doggone it. Shut your mouth and do what I tell you to do. I know what I'm talking about. Trust the game plan. And Jesus in this context, he's hearing from this woman who, again, what does she want to talk about? She wants to talk about worship. She wants to talk about relationships. She wants to talk about God. She wants to talk about Messiah. And if there was ever a point where there was an expert at the table, you know, Jesus listening to this woman, and he could be like, you know, I know some things about the Messiah if you let me talk for a second, you know, God. God and I are tight, very closely related.
He's an expert in the field. He knows what he's talking about. And so he lets her ask questions. She pushes back, she changes subjects.
[00:07:30] Speaker C: She.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: She expresses this confusion in the middle of it. She talks theology, and she tells Jesus what she thinks. And Jesus stays engaged in this conversation. He doesn't dominate it. He doesn't crush her. He doesn't teach her in the moment. Instead, this actively engaging and creating a space for conversation I believe in and of itself is a profound act of love.
And it's not through what he's saying.
It's through his interest in continuing to stay in the conversation.
Because the irony is that one of the fastest ways that we can communicate to another person that they don't matter is to treat the conversation as something that we just need to manage or to get through.
Got to look over their head, wondering what the next thing is, how long is this going to last? But Jesus doesn't manage her or the conversation.
[00:08:18] Speaker D: He.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: He encounters her, and she can feel the difference.
I mentioned the author, Pete Scazera last week. He's written these. This great series of books called Emotionally Healthy, Emotionally Healthy Leader, and Relationships and Marriages and all those things.
And he talks about how this requires us, in order to be emotionally healthy, to listen not only to someone's words, but to try to begin to understand what's happening beneath the surface. And we talked a lot about that last week. And so I won't go super deep into what beneath the surface is, but this is important. This is our intention behind listening. Not just to gather information and data on how we can respond, but instead begin to try to understand what's going on beneath the surface of another person. Because I don't know if you've noticed this, but people rarely say what is actually going on inside of them when they're talking to You.
But Jesus had this incredible ability to see and read between the lines and understand what's going on beneath someone's words.
And so the woman says, after Jesus says, I'll give you living water. She says, sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.
And Jesus responds, go call your husband and come back. And at first, it almost sounds like Jesus changes the subject, right? Like he ignores what she's saying, but he hasn't changed the subject. They're talking about thirst. And now Jesus gently enters into this deeper thirst of her life. He's continuing the conversation, but at another level when she says, I have no husband. And Jesus replies, you're right when you say you have no husband. And then he tells her that she has five husbands and the man she is currently with is not her husband.
And so this. This could be like a gotcha moment, right? This is a little bit like there's a moment where this feels like TMZ and Jesus like, yeah, we've been having this conversation, but let me know. Let me tell you what I know about you and this who thing. But he's not interested in shaming her. He's not trying to humiliate her, and he's not reducing her down to this bit of her history and her story that he could easily reduce her down to. He has no interest in. He doesn't stop and go, oh, five husbands.
Can you believe it? Everybody tell her what she won.
He's not grandstanding. He's not trying to take this massive moral high ground. He's not interested in this. There's truth in his conversation, but he installs truth into the conversation while also allowing her to have dignity, which is something that so many people would not extend to her in that culture at that time.
And so Jesus brings up these deep wounds and he brings them out into light without treating her like the wounds are the actual whole story.
This is an unbelievable form of listening, I'll have you know, because good listening asks what's really happening inside the person.
Not how quickly can I correct them or how fast can I fix this, but what are they carrying and what are they afraid of?
Now, this happens all the time. You know, we got.
Even though Jesus specifically, like, taught on and preached on this, we got people a lot of times in Christian faith that are like, well, look, here's the deal. I'm just a truth teller.
You know, I just tell the truth.
I'm that guy, and I hear that in Christian context. And I go, you are a jerk, and you want to be a jerk with permission from the Bible.
That's how you want to live this life?
[00:11:43] Speaker C: Well, no, no, no, no.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: I'm not a jerk. I'm just truth teller.
And we like this idea, right? Our brains want everything to be really, really, really simple. We don't want to be able to just say, no, look, I'm just telling the truth, and however you take it, that's your fault and whatever. And I'm just a grace person. I ignore any bit of truth. And I just believe that, you know, we should believe everyone for everything that look. And Jesus is saying, look, I'm full of grace and truth, 100% grace and 100% truth. And I don't have any interest in sitting here and shaming people. I can bring truth into the conversation while I can also ensure that everybody that I'm talking to knows that they are loved and cared for and that they have dignity.
This is hard work.
It's easy to be truth dude, and it's really lame, and it is not reflective of the nature of Jesus. It's really, really hard to bring truth into the conversation and allow somebody to still have their dignity.
But that's the work of the church. That's the work of your marriage. That's the worth of your friendships.
It allows. It encourages you. It forces you to not just say, all right, what is the truth about the behavior in this situation? But it encourages you to ask yourself, but what are they caring? What are they afraid of? How do we get to this point? And how can I care for this person based on all of those things?
And most of us have listening styles, so I'm going to bring out a few different styles. If you came with somebody today, this is where you're going to get elbowed in the ribs, all right? So just sit back, relax, and enjoy the fun. Okay?
The first style is the fixer.
The fixer hears someone's problem and immediately thinks, I know what you should do.
Okay? Your teenager asks, school's been really hard lately. And almost before they finish the sentence, you say, well, you have. You talk to your teacher.
Your spouse says, I'm exhausted. And you respond, huh, we probably should have gone to bed earlier.
Perfect solution. Should have came to me sooner.
We can fix this, right?
Five seconds later, you're building a strategy. Fix yours mean really, really well, and they genuinely want to help. But sometimes the other person isn't asking you to repair their life. Instead, they just want you to enter into it with them and hear Them and fixers are actually pretty decent at entering into the life, but don't always hear everything the other person has to say. The defender is the second one. The defender hears something like that may be criticism, and immediately builds a case against the person that is presenting it.
I am a defender. I'm a really, really good listener. And I really just listen so that I can gather data so that I can argue better.
Yeah, no, keep talking, keep talking. I'm taking notes.
There's plenty of holes in your argument
[00:14:31] Speaker D: already,
[00:14:34] Speaker B: and it's kind of a narcissistic. We are a little bit of a narcissistic people in our listening. We're always on alert for criticism or ways that we haven't done things properly or well. And we want to make sure that you know that while your problem continues to exist, what you need to is that I didn't do anything to create that, and I haven't done anything wrong, and I won't do anything wrong.
And before they finish, we say, you know, well, that's not what I meant. That's not fair.
You did the same thing last week. The defender's listening for accusations rather than being interested in actually understanding the other person.
Fixers aren't asking, what was that experience like for you? Fixers are saying, how do I prove that I wasn't in the wrong? In this scenario, that's our primary motivation.
And then the final one is the advisor. Now, the advisor can sound a lot of times like the fixer, but the advisor likes there to be a lot more distance between themselves and the person that they are listening to.
It's a person with a few solutions before you finish explaining the problem.
Advice is helpful, and sometimes people are actually asking for it. But fixers, excuse me, advisors, love the unsolicited advice route.
They like to subtly communicate. I can understand your life better than you do.
And also you and me, we are not connected at this moment. Fixers are. A lot of times are connected. Even though they're overzealous, Advisors want to be separate.
They want to command the conversation from a distance. And so intimacy is difficult for the advisors.
And what the tie that binds every single kind of listener, I believe, is that all of us want to control the outcome.
And so there's this great other story there. Jesus encounters this rich young ruler, and it says in Mark, chapter 10, the rich young ruler comes to him and he says, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And eventually Jesus tells him, there's one thing that you lack. Go and sell everything. You have and give to the poor and then come and follow me.
But right before that, in Mark, chapter 10, verse 21, it says Jesus looked at him and loved him.
He looked at him and loved him.
And then the man walked away sad and Jesus let him go.
That's the astonishing thing, is that Jesus didn't go and chase him down the road, right? Jesus is having this tough talk with him and he looks at the rich young ruler and he says, go sell everything you have and give it to the poor uncommon to follow me. And then the ruler walks away sad and Jesus doesn't go, whoa, hey, wait a minute. Like what? I mean, like everything is kind of a metaphorical everything. You know, I came out a little bit too strong. I was a little bit too harsh. Let me.
Why don't we go ahead and we fix this thing.
He doesn't negotiate and he doesn't manipulate. He doesn't try another sales pitch and he doesn't fix it. He doesn't defend himself, he doesn't continue to advise him. He loves him and he speaks the truth to him.
He allows him to hold onto his dignity and he allows him to make his own decision.
It reminds me of the Golden Rule, treat others how you want to be treated. You notice that it doesn't say treat others how you want to be treated. And in almost no time there will be incredible return on investment in treating other people how you want to be treated.
Because you know, you put that out into the world and out into the universe and then it'll come back to you. And I got to tell you, it's kind of core to the Christian faith that a lot of times if you act in humility, you listen really, really well and you act in open handed love with people that, that love never totally comes back in a satisfactory way.
My brother used to say. And my brother, you know, I wouldn't say he's following Jesus. So you take this phrase for however you want it. My brother would often say he said the best kind of Christian one that will be kind and suffer the consequences.
I'm going to listen so that I can get the outcome that I want. I'm going to listen so that I can get what I want on the other side. That's not why we do this. That's not why we listen really, really well. That's not the idea. So that we can control the outcome. Instead, sometimes we listen because we secretly hope that if we listen long enough we can get someone to do what I think they should do do. That's not listening.
But instead, we get to look at others and we get to love them.
And sometimes they walk away, and sometimes they come close.
But if we follow after the way of Jesus in this. In this phrase, there's no. There's no chasing, no fixing, no last argument, but there is eternal and constant and present love.
And so I wonder if this is the opportunity that the church has. And you know what? We've said it a million times, and it's almost become rote. And in such divisive and difficult times in our world, I wonder if the best way that we can care for the people around us is to say, I see you. I'm listening. You don't have to rush. You don't have to pretend. Tell me more.
Allow people to be seen exactly how they are to be welcomed at your table, to share your coffee so they may know that their life matters. Amen.
Amen. I'm gonna invite three of my friends up. This is. Can you give a big round of applause for Steve and Cindy and Ed.
And these three are. They're all therapists in town. They all attend Westside, which is horrifically scary to me every time I preach.
They're generally complimentary to me, though, except for Steve.
And so I just have a few questions that I want to ask you guys. It's always good to get, again, some experts in the field. I'm not sure how much you guys love the world word expert using this context, but I'm going to keep using it to just give us an idea of what you're seeing in relationships with people out there. Maybe some short ways forward, some. A few solutions along the way. We only have so much time, and this is kind of part of a longer conversation, but we would just love your insight. So I'll start with you, Edward, if you don't mind.
You recently led a grief class here at the church, which is.
I've just heard only good things.
How does that experience and your expertise in grief, or what you see in grief in other people's relationships, how does it have an impact on people and their interpersonal relationships?
[00:21:20] Speaker C: Yeah. So, you know, relationships can be hard.
And from what you preached last week, you know, going inward, understand what's going on within us can also be difficult. So when you add a layer or when you're going through a season of grief now you have all these things working, and it can be very impactful. You know, grief can sometimes cause us to shut down, to go inward. The pain is too real. So we numb ourselves by trying to ignore It. And when that happens, you know, especially in relationships, we stop talking, we stop sharing, we stop telling our partner or our friends what's going on or, you know, some of us, we like to talk about it. We want to talk about it. You know, we are like, hey, who wants to hear my story? My pain, My. My. My agony. So. So. So when you have. Especially two people who grieve very differently for good reasons in a relationship or even in a friendship, that can be very hard because then it feels like nobody wants to hear me or my partner only wants to talk about it, and I want to do something different. So, yeah, grief can really impact how it shows up in relationships and how we show up for one another.
Yeah.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: How do you. What are all the different ways that grief shows up? And this could be a question for all of you. I think a lot of times we think about a big loss or a death in the family. Right. But grief, I would assume, is a little bit more expansive than just that.
[00:22:50] Speaker D: I think there's a lot of griefs that we discount, a lot of losses that we go through.
All of those of you who are with me in aging, I'm astonished at the number of losses of, oh, I can't do that anymore, or, you know, now I'm moving to a place where I've lost my community. There's things like that. There's illnesses, there's miscarriages, for sure, are under.
Recognized as a really significant form of grief.
But there are so many types of losses that we experience. It's not just death.
And we can really be helpful with each other to find sometimes, especially to find others that share the same type of loss, to talk that through, because they've walked in our shoes and they understand.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
We do, I think, sometimes put grief and loss on a bell curve, you know, like, well, that's really big, and that's really a lot when you're going through it, it's probably sometimes the biggest loss you've ever had.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: And I think to recognize that and really witness what that person's feeling is really important to say, hey, I do see you. I care. It's like your sermon. Jesus saw us wherever they were in their loss, and it could be a loss of a promotion. But to recognize that and say, yeah, I'm bearing witness to what you're going through right now, that's good.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Cindy, you do premarital counseling here at Westside, actually. So if you. If you come and you want premarital counseling through the church, you're probably going to get Cindy or I, as we take the majority of couples, and you pray for Cindy.
So. And you've got that along with your years of couples counseling, you got a lot of expertise in the field. So can you give us maybe one or two of the most common hang ups that you see among couples? And I would imagine listening has a tendency to be a part of this a little bit.
[00:24:40] Speaker D: Yeah, that's a big part of it.
So there's a couple different scenarios where people might come in, they may be thinking about getting engaged, or they're already planning the wedding.
But for both sides, it always ends up that there's this unspoken question about, are we a good fit?
We're going to start melding the these families together.
And Lord knows we have a ton of baggage on each side, so how are we going to do that?
And the best way to do that, I think, is to allow a partner to listen to the other partner tell their story. So we end up doing this big, huge, glorified family tree that tracks the values and belief systems that have come down through generations about things like gender roles and who holds the power and what do we think about parenting and how do we express our faith. There's a lot of things that we hold that come from previous generations.
When you allow a partner to tell their story, a lot of times the other one's looking at them like, oh, really? Like, I didn't realize that. And we talk about little T traumas, the things that hurt you but you recovered from pretty quickly, and the big T traumas, which are the ones that cause a lot of sensitivity. And once we know those things, it leads to the second question is how do we fight? How can we resolve conflict and how can we do that without hurting each other so much?
And basically what we end up doing is we sit down and we take a specific fight that they bring in and. And we diagram it on a piece of paper and show that it's actually a dance. And every couple has their own unique dance.
And it's basically an infinity loop that kind of goes on and on and on and escalates. And on the surface of that, you've got these external behaviors that your partner's seeing. Like, oh, her voice is getting louder. Oh no, she's looking me really in the eye. Or oh, no, he's backing up and doesn't want to deal with me.
So there's these external behaviors that are fueled by the under the surface stuff that you've been talking about. The pain, shame, fear, those really deep Seated things that have come from usually the way you've been raised or things you've gone through.
So once we figure out that dance, the basic plan is how do we stop this, how can we step away from it and how can we do it differently once we understand what really driving it?
That's just such a gift to take into your marriage. And everybody could benefit from learning how to do that.
And then they end up taking better care of each other because they sort of understand more of the reasons why things are going south.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: And that understanding seems to be, you know, a lot of times we talk about in the context of marriage and that's your expertise. But of course, I'm sure you see this in the workplace and then interpersonal friendships and there's all kinds of scenarios in which that family tree is actually a helpful exercise.
[00:27:49] Speaker D: Right. Yeah.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Steve, you're actually going to lead marriage.
What are we calling it? A conference, A small group marriage tune up.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Marriage marriage tune up. Yeah.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Here at the church in September. So really excited that you do that, actually, if you would, those of you out here, we're going to put a QR code up that's going to lead you to a forum where you can ask some questions. And this is going to help us inform some of the material that we're going to do during this class. If you could submit questions, that would be amazing. If you could just submit a voice recording of you and someone you love arguing.
Like, let's just get straight to the data and it's okay. We'll publish it on the website, but we won't put your names on it. Okay, but you've worked with a lot of military couples, and I mean couples in general, of course. But how do couples grow in relationship and communication skills specifically, especially after they've been maybe practicing the wrong methods for a long time.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question, Ben. You know, we all have bad habits, but my wife and I, you know, they're over 30 years and we try to practice this. I practice with my couples. But, you know, just some simple things you can take with you today that you can actually start working on your communication skills and your friendship. Number one, how you say hello and how you say goodbye really matters. The Gottmans call it partings and reunions. You know, that's a time for you to connect every day.
You may have different schedules. Fine, Leave a post it note. But that's an opportunity to say, hey, I see you, I hear you, I'm listening. And you can make it really intentional So I don't know what your departures and reunions are like yours, hellos and goodbyes, but make that a time of intentionality.
Second, go back to the things that make your partner tick. You remember those things you talked about when you were dating, you know, long ago.
Go back to those things.
And it's never too late to communicate. An example might be, hey, you know, I haven't asked you this question in a while, but I think that Italian food was your favorite food. Is that. Is that still correct or has it changed? Oh, no, no. I like Mexican or I like Thai food. Okay, now I know, right? We want to look for those opportunities to connect an intentional date time. Again, it's never too late to date. I think that's the big lie. Is it like, oh, gosh, we're so far gone. It takes very little to turn it around. Okay, very little. So set and establish a date time. A time to have fun, talk about it. Put on the calendar, set it, make it happen.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Go for a walk.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: It doesn't have to be anything big, but go have fun and say, hey, I see you.
Make it intentional. Even if you're arguing about something. Okay.
It's too easy to say, no, we're not going to do it. So if it's on the calendar, execute it. Go out and have a good time. Last thing I would say, have a weekly State of the Union meeting, a weekly check in when you're saying, hey, what's going on in your life? What's happening? What do I need to be aware of? How can I support you? And are the things that we need to be talking about? And I guess one more thing. I'd say put your cell phone away. That would help. That's it.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: My notes are on it right now. But I will.
One last thing. It feels like to me, if I'm reading between the lines, that everything you guys are talking about requires a slower pace.
So first of all, is that true? Is slowing down important?
And then also, what does it look like practically for you guys to slow down? That can be for anybody.
That can be for Edward.
[00:31:22] Speaker C: Yeah, totally.
You know, I'm changing my answer from first service.
Loneliness is such an epidemic in the United States.
And our ability to slow down, our ability just to, you know, just take our time to do life, is so important.
You know, in fact, when Steve was talking about dating, there's this cute couple in front of me. I'm not going to name their names. They said every day.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: I heard that.
[00:31:50] Speaker C: And that's so beautiful, because slowing down allows us to really enjoy and spend time with our partner and with our sweetheart. So, you know, that is just a gift that we can give to each other. It just doesn't happen while we are dating or while we're pursuing each other. It's a pursuit we can do every day.
[00:32:09] Speaker D: So, yeah, I'd say find a way to turn down the engine. You know, we all have an engine that drives us, and we have to do this and that. And sometimes we don't even realize that we actually have the choice to dial it down.
Take a breath, sit down, really listen. Like, if you're. If you're running at 100 miles an hour, you're not going to be listening and do figure out your own. Everybody downshifts differently, right? There's different things that work for all of us.
Studies show that it's usually something physical.
So go outside, take a deep breath in the air, stretch, shake it off like dogs do when they run past another dog.
Just do whatever you need to do to just dial it down so that you can begin to notice what's really happening.
[00:33:02] Speaker A: Yeah, with my clients, always use this analogy of your Duracell battery. Green, yellow, red.
What makes you more green? If you're orange, what can raise you, give you a little bump? For my wife and I, our big thing is to be able to go out and walk and just talk, and we process all the stuff for the first hour, and then things slow down and we just kind of like hang out and be with each other. But you need those times to just step away, you know, just from the business of it all.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: Can you guys give these three a big hand, please?
Amen. I'm going to invite you to stand and we're going to read our benediction together as we close.
I'm going to pray this first part over you, and then I'll say the second part together. I pray that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Let's say this part together now. To him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever, Amen. Amen. You're loved. Go in peace.
