Let’s Stop Shouting.

We’ve all been at a party or around the dinner table where multiple conversations are happening at once. And over the course of the evening, the voices seem to get louder and louder because everyone is trying to be heard, get their point across, or share a funny or aggravating moment. And as one voice gets louder, the next one must also get louder for anyone to hear them. 

Before you know it, everyone’s shouting and becoming more animated, even using their hands to talk so their story is clearly heard or the most engaging in the room. And whether you’re the one talking or the one trying to listen, your stress begins to rise because of the overwhelming amount of noise and conversations that are happening. 

At the end of the night, you walk out the door to go home, you notice the silence for the first time and think—what the hell just happened?

That’s how I feel about 2020.

It was a tough year, not just “for many”, but for the whole freaking world. And social media has become the place for our world to not only to share their stories or offer hope, but it also became a hot bed of shouting and horrible hateful words where people would even assume a persons character based on nothing but a simple post or lack there of. And the voices got louder and louder and the only way to hear my own thoughts again was to put down the phone and walk out the door.

My prayer for 2021, is for us all to be a little more curious and a little less critical.

My prayer for 2021, is that we can all be a little more curious and a little less critical. Because criticism comes from hurt and fear but curiosity leads us to listen and connect.

If we listen long enough, we will hear and understand the dreams, hopes, fears, and even the insecurities of each others’ stories. They might not even share them explicitly, but we can recognize them because we see the same in our own story—and that’s the type of connection our world needs.

So if we could all practice listening, just a little more, we might find that we are actually more alike than we are different. That we agree on more than we disagree. And that even in the disagreements, we can still find common ground that we are all hurting humans living in a wildly out of control world. And that we all just need a little more grace as we live in it.

I’m all about “letting your voice be heard,” but not at the sake of trampling over others. Because let’s be honest—if no one is listening, aren’t we all just wasting our words?

Let’s stop shouting and be more curious this year.

“Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”

Ephesians 4:15-16

Photo by @theindiaedit