Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life. – James 1:19-21 (The Message)
I bought myself a page-a-day calendar for the 2022 year with quotes about leadership each day. Most are rather bland or irrelevant to church life, but there are plenty that I find to be valuable. The ones that I find to be particularly interesting or moving I post around my office. A few I have considered using as a basis for a devotion, though I have not gotten around to doing so yet.
One of the disciplines I have had to adhere to is to force myself to focus on the quote and not on who said it. The quotations come from a wide variety of figures. Some are political figures, some intellectual figures, others religious leaders, and still others motivational speakers, social reformers, or business leaders. I found that if I looked first at who the quotation was from, my preconceived notions of that person colored how I received the quotations. Sometimes it meant I overvalued the quotation, because it was a figure I admired, sometimes I was resistant based on what I knew of the person, and other times the quotation simply showed an aspect of the person that I don’t normally associate with that figure. Whatever it was, my preconceived narrow sense of who someone is made it harder to be truly open to listening to what the quotation had to say.
It is so easy to fall into that trap, isn’t it? Especially with current figures, we tend to want to quickly reduce them to heroes and villains, or to “my people” and “others.” We don’t take the time to truly listen and judge the fullness of thought. We settle for sound bites and first impressions. We need to recover the discipline of truly listening and digesting what we hear before making judgments about it. This is an important way of cultivating the humility of getting out of our own way and truly being open to prayerful discernment. As James reminds us, we must lead with our ears and follow that with our cautious speech, leaving our judgmental anger at the rear.