Day Twenty-One

Day Twenty-One // March 20 // Tone-Deafness

“Somewhere we know that, without silence, words lose their meaning; that without listening, speaking no longer heals; that without distance, closeness cannot cure.” – Henri Nouwen –

It is an ancient curse that feels shiny and new: tonedeafness. It’s not the actual physical disease that denies one’s ears the ability to hear, but the spiritual and emotional disease that denies our souls the ability to discern. It’s the one who laughs in the midst of another’s tears. It’s the one who dances to the music of a dirge. And we’ve all been guilty of it.

We have all been in situations where we were not present enough in mind to read the cues. We’ve all missed the signals. Perhaps it’s not a cause of the rot, but it is certainly a symptom. The poorly worded phrase. The ill-timed joke.

It is a spiritual matter. By the sake of our baptism and good confession of the faith, we are all ministers of Jesus Christ. We are all ambassadors of His Kingdom – expected to conduct ourselves with a certain level of statesmanship and tact. It is the only way the Gospel ever spreads: one believer telling one seeker of grace, one believer telling one seeker of redemption. But our well-intentioned words will carry only as much weight as our actions can support.

Time and time again, Jesus warned the religious of their hypocrisy. He confronted their echo-chambers where they heard only what they wanted to hear. He challenged the deafness of their faith: the priest who passed by the wounded traveler and the Samaritan who heard his helpless cry… and acted.

We live in a similar world – in a time when it is increasingly easy for us to disconnect from all that we would rather not see and from all that we would rather not hear. But the call of the Almighty is that we would unstop our obstructed ears and unclog our fitful souls and act, that we would perceive with our hearts that which our heads cannot. To break for (and with) the broken. To hear the cry of the needy. To speak to the least and the lost and the lonely – offering them the healing grace only God provides through His children.