Listening Lessons from a Little Guy
As we headed to church during a winter visit with our son’s family a few months ago, Ray climbed into the back of their minivan. I sat in the middle seat wedged between two carseats with our five-year-old grandson on my right and his two-year-old brother on my left. I had the best seat in the minivan.
Lessons from the Best Seat
Always ready far ahead for any place we’re going — now is the time for anyone who knows me well to look askance and then laugh uproariously — I pulled out the zippered Hershey’s cosmetic bag Ray bought me a few years ago at Hershey, Pennsylvania. The two-year-old stared wide-eyed as I lined my lips with lip-liner. Under his watchful eye, I popped the lid off a silver lipstick tube, twirled up the lipstick, and spread it across my lips.
Turning aside to the little guy, I asked, “What is Little doing?”
“Coloring your lips?” he asked.
As we finished lunch at Tom & Chee last Thursday in Cincinnati, I pulled out my Hershey bag again to repeat the fun. This time the little guy took the lipstick and helped. Well, I don’t guess you would exactly call it helping, but it was okay. There were, after all, plenty of napkins.
Lessons at the Bathroom Sink
While I held my little grandson up to the sink to wash his hands in the hotel bathroom last week, he told me which faucet was hot and which was cold. Then he told me he wanted the water to be loud. It has never crossed my mind to call more water pressure “loud,” but it didn’t take me long to figure out what he wanted.
Lessons from a Duck
As time came for us to part ways on Sunday and head for home “to next time” (that’s what one of the children Bethany used to babysit for used to say in anticipation for the next time she would come for “sittering”), Ray and I (a.k.a. Notty and Little) played with the boys while their parents packed up their travel gear. In the midst of our fun, our precious two-year-old began to cry for no apparent reason. I don’t know if he bit his lip or pinched a finger or what. All I know is that he was very upset and couldn’t tell me why. After he got his message across sufficiently, he calmed down.
The five-year-old continued to lead Ray in games of “pool” with rules never heard of by the American Poolplayers Association (APA), while the little guy and I sat in a corner, singing, playing finger games, and looking at pictures. One picture was of a bright yellow duck gleefully standing in a sparkling blue puddle and wearing orange boots. Later he wanted to see the “duck who is swimming standing up” again.
We humans start using our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch right from the beginning, but it takes a lifetime to learn to see, smell, hear, taste, and feel things the way other people do. Putting others first in our listening and communicating is one way to be like Jesus.
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit,
but with humility of mind regard one another
as more important than yourselves;
do not merely look out for your own personal interests,
but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves
which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, although He existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant,
and being made in the likeness of men.
Philippians 2:3-7