Listening To Ourselves Takes Courage
Listening to Ourselves
Reflection By Scott Stoner
As we seek to live well through Lent, we too will need to confront our wilderness places—wrestling again and again with the insecurities, the frustrations, the hungers that leave us feeling less than and not enough.
- Dawna Wall
When hiking a trail, it is common to find benches along the way where hikers can stop and take a rest, like the bench we see on the front cover. I invite us to use today as a bench to sit upon and to take a rest, reflecting on the challenging work of listening more fully to ourselves that we have engaged in this week.
Dawna Wall described this challenging work of genuinely listening to ourselves in her reflection last Sunday. She reminded us that listening to ourselves can bring us face to face with our insecurities and frustrations. The temptation is to turn away and not listen.
We have learned this week that if we choose to avoid the challenging work of listening to ourselves, often we will prolong any difficulty we are facing. We have also learned that the choices we make regarding how we listen to ourselves set the patterns we have for listening to God, and listening to others.
So as we rest on this metaphorical hiker’s bench, let’s be gentle with ourselves, and celebrate and appreciate the inner work we have done this week. My hope is that our inner work will bear good fruit throughout the remainder of our journey through Lent.
Making It Personal: Reflecting back over this past week, what was it like to focus on listening to yourself? As we continue our focus on the theme of listening, is there one thing that you have learned so far that you want to be sure to hold on to throughout the remainder of this season of Lent?
Follow along with us this Lent season with our daily devotional and engage in discussion in our closed facebook group moderated by Robbin Brent, Jan Kwiatowski, and Scott Stoner.
In this group, participants will have a chance to share their responses to the prompts in the daily readings, and also the chance to receive additional material for reflection.