Stay Curious, My Friends

On the power of listening

Photo by Oleksandr P: https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-women-sitting-on-ground-near-bonfire-344102/

(A six-minute read.)

One of my most enduring memories from my childhood, which was repeated frequently, is my Aunt Shirley on the “T” (the subway system in Boston), talking to strangers. She was notorious for talking people’s ears off and knowing their life story by the time she went from one stop to the next.

My dad, who’s Aunt Shirley’s youngest sibling, is the same way. Neither of them have ever met a stranger. They will sit next to someone on the train or notice someone at the ice cream shop and, before you know it, have a whole biography of them. The rest of us sort of just roll our eyes and know that a story is inevitably coming about the person they met.

But what stands out to me the most is what my Aunt Shirley told me one time about how she does it.

“Do you know what the key is to talking to strangers?” she asked me once. “Just ask them questions about themselves. Because here’s the thing: people love to talk about themselves.”

It’s something I’ve actually taken to heart. I’m not claiming that I’m Mr. Congeniality or Dr. Charisma—someone who is incredibly outgoing, and with great energy talks every person’s ear off I ever encounter.

But I am, to perhaps a slightly lesser degree, my aunt’s nephew and my father’s son. I absolutely love to meet new people and learn their stories.

I do this for two reasons: first, out of personal curiosity.

For whatever reason, I have an insatiable desire to really know and understand people. I want to figure out what makes them tick. I want to hear their stories of pain and joy and sadness.

Second, I know how good it feels for someone to take a genuine interest in me—which is actually very, very rare.

I know there are many people who want to stay in the darkness and don’t want to show much of themselves. But I do believe that—deep down inside—people really do want to be known and understood. They want to feel like they have value and their stories are worth hearing. They want to know that they are worthy enough for someone to take an interest in them.

As I said, I know how I feel when someone is “into me” (and I’m not at all speaking in a romantic sense). It’s euphoric and gratifying and dignifying. It causes me to believe that—just maybe—I’m worth taking notice of and that my life has value.

But as I said, it’s actually incredibly rare.

I’ve found that most people in life are—somewhat understandably—very self-absorbed, no doubt dealing with many stresses in their lives, which means they have very little energy to take an active interest in the lives of others.

It’s also kind of a vulnerable and humble thing to ask questions about others and to take an interest in their lives—both because it runs the risk of turning into a longer and more costly investment than we feel like we can afford, and because it implicitly communicates that we have an interest in the other person on some level.

But I’d submit that it’s an incredibly gracious and sacred gift that we can give to other people—a rare commodity in our age of polarity and self-absorption.

Indeed, I’d propose that if we want to be a positive presence in this world, it starts with being curious about other people—about taking an interest in their stories and dignifying them with the humble “ministry” of listening.

This is true in general, of course, but it’s especially true for those of us who are seeking to participate in God’s mission in the world.

To this end, I used to think that listening to other people’s stories gave me permission to later “witness” to them. But then it suddenly dawned on me that in a world full of self-absorbed people who rarely take time to slow down and listen to others, listening itself is the “witnessing.”

This isn’t to deny the power and importance of sharing God’s story with others. I’m still a big fan and advocate of that.

But we’re doing a very important gospel work when we dignify people by slowing down and listening to their stories.

A “how to”

So how do we do this?

It doesn’t take much. It can start simply with, “How’s your day going?”

It can then include questions about where a person is from, where they grew up, who their family is, what they do for work, what they like to do in their free time, etc.

It can also go deeper and deeper as the conversation allows (asking them about their hopes, fears, joys, and personal values).

And because I’m also extremely curious when it comes to religious stuff (not because I’m looking to convert people, but just because I’m genuinely curious—and I happen to still maintain that there’s no greater insight into who a person is than their relation to spirituality), I’ll often eventually throw in a question like, “So did you go to church when you were a kid?” or something like that.

That sort of question tends to open up the floodgates—even with people who aren’t particularly religious themselves, or who may have even consciously rejected it altogether. But I’ve never had a conversation with people about religion or spirituality that went sideways—with them getting upset or belligerent that I would dare raise the topic.

When it’s done tactfully, humbly, and non-dogmatically, religious conversation—even with people who are supposedly opposed to religion—can be refreshing and insightful.

Of course, there are plenty of people who give out disinterested vibes about any or all of these questions. They simply don’t want to talk or to reveal anything about themselves. And that’s fine.

If you’re picking up those vibes, then don’t force the issue—and leave them alone!

But more often than not, I find that most people are totally fine talking about themselves if we take a genuine interest in them.

So just do it!

People deserve to have others “dig” them. And it goes a lot further than we realize.

I remember an insightful conversation I had with one of my former leaders at my church in Bangor a few years ago. He had actually been homeless for a little while, wandering the streets of—and crashing on friend’s couches in—Bangor, before turning his life around and eventually finding his way to our church (where he became an “elder”).

“You don’t know how powerful it is for a homeless person,” he explained to me, “if you just stop on the street and talk to them.” Just spending five minutes asking them about their stories, even if we never give them a dime or resolve any or all of their problems, communicates that they have dignity and value and a life worth living.

In fact, he told me specifically of one homeless friend of his who had planned to take his own life, but before going through with the plan, a stranger walking by stopped and talked to him for five minutes. That little episode was enough to convince the guy that his life was worth living—that he had dignity, worth, and value.

So stay curious, my friends. It could save a life.

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Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.