Cultivating Intentional Conversations

Intentional conversations are often the key to to helping change people's lives. Spiritually intentional conversations deal with what's really going on in a person's life, and often help people see themselves (and others) more clearly. Author, counselor, and Pastor Paul Tripp illustrates this vividly through the following story: “My brother Tedd, who has always been a mentor to me, was riding home with me after a conference on marriage and family counseling. We were going about sixty-five miles per hour when he said to me, “You know, Paul, we probably should apply the principles that we learned this weekend to our own marriages. Why don't you start?” He then proceeded to ask me a series of questions about my relationship with Luella. I don't remember any of the specific questions, but I do remember the profound impact they had on me. It was as if God was tearing down thick velvet curtains that stood between me and an accurate understanding of my marriage. I saw myself with clarity, and what I saw wasn't pretty! Through those questions I watched myself do and say things I could not believe. Through those questions I finally understood Luella's experience and her frustrations. I saw my defensiveness and self-righteousness, and I saw that I had to change for the sake of the Lord and for the good of my marriage. Those questions were truly life-changing for me.”

Tripp recorded that story in one of his books on counseling, called Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands. What I love about that story is how aptly it illustrates the importance of asking good questions! Good questions are one of the keys to having a fruitful intentional conversation. If you can learn to ask people the right questions in a tone of voice that is inviting and not overbearing, it will be much, much easier for you to approach sensitive topics with others and also much easier to avoid having your friends or family feel like you are lecturing them. Although I should add, much also depends on your willingness and ability to be a good listener and not interrupt too frequently.

How to Have Intentional Conversations

Rule #1: Before you even start asking people questions, the first rule of thumb is this: people will only talk to you honestly if they trust you. Sounds simple and obvious, right? Sure, but ask yourself, “Am I the kind of person people would be willing to trust with the more intimate details of their lives?”

So what does it mean exactly to be a trustworthy person? The following list of questions might be helpful to ask yourself:

Do I often ask people how they're doing, and do I really mean it? Or am I just expecting them to say, “I'm fine” and move on with life?
Do I gossip about other people and share their personal news with others, or am I able to keep things in confidence?
Do I pray for others often? And do I pray with others often?
Do I genuinely care about other people's difficulties, or do I hope they'll tell me everything is going well so I don't have to face their pain or hard questions?
Am I able to give other people's burdens to the Lord in prayer, or am I weighed down by their sorrows or trials?
Do I share openly with others about my own struggles and am I willing to ask them to pray for me? This is key. People will feel more comfortable sharing with you if they know you are also willing to be vulnerable.

You don't have to be a perfect person before you can help others, but you should at least be aware of your weaknesses so that you can seek to grow in those areas.

Rule #2: Start at the surface and work your way down. To quote Shrek (the jolly green ogre of animated movie fame), “People are like onions. They have layers.” Don't try to get to the inner core before you've gradually worked at peeling back the outer layers. If you're just getting to know someone, it's not a good idea to start by asking them things like, “What's your biggest fear?” or “What's your greatest weakness?” or even, “How can I pray for you?”

Try to start with basic questions like, “What have you been up to lately?” “How is your family?” “What's new with you?” etc. Over time, as you get to know the person, you can start to introduce questions that are designed to go deeper, like, “What has the Lord been teaching you lately?” The goal is to get to know people well. As my Professor Ed Welch would always say, you want to know people well enough that you're aware of at least three areas of struggle for which they need prayer.

Rule #3: If you want to have an in-depth conversation with someone, choose an appropriate time and setting. In other words, standing in the church foyer at noon may not be the best place to have a long conversation about the struggles of the past week. Your friend is likely to be shifting his weight and looking at his watch because he's in a hurry to go home and eat lunch. If you want to go deeper with someone, set up a lunch date or meet her at a coffee shop. Setting is important, because people's expectations often heavily influence conversations. Most people do not expect to have deep conversations when they see you in passing, so it's best to save your more intentional questions for a time when they'll be relaxed and ready to chat.

Proverbs 10:20 says, Proverbs 10:20 says, “The tongue of the righteous is choice silver, but the heart of the wicked is of little value.” God clearly tells us here that wise and gracious words are invaluable. So don't be afraid to ask good questions. As long as you ask them graciously, most people will be happy to answer. If they're not, it may be because they're not ready to open up yet. If that's the case, just do your best to be a good and trustworthy friend. That in itself will speak volumes.

Growing in Love: A Sign of Maturity

Sometimes it seems like “Love your neighbor as yourself” has become a Christian stock phrase, right up there with, “I'll pray about that,” “Jesus loves you,” and “Everything happens for a reason.” Not to say that any of these phrases are wrong in and of themselves. Each phrase contains a powerful truth that, when applied correctly, can be life-changing.

Take loving your neighbor, for example. Most Christians realize this is what they should be doing, but many think this means having warm and fuzzy feelings about all the people you meet. As everyone knows, this is virtually impossible. So what does it really mean to love your neighbor? And how are we supposed to show our neighbors that we love them?

Something that has struck me during the past two semesters of biblical counseling classes is that loving people is a lot more fundamental to my Christian walk than I am inclined to think, and it also involves a lot more effort and sacrifice than I'm inclined to muster. Prior to seminary, my typical reasoning about loving my neighbor ran somewhere along these lines: “I'm supposed to love my neighbor, so I guess what this means is that I should love my family, be a responsible employee, be nice to my friends, and be cordial with everyone else I meet.” So far, so good.

But while that sounded perfectly fine and nice when summed up in a neat statement like that, I began to realize that I had dumbed down my standard to fit what I was comfortable with. This realization was hammered in for me when I took a pivotal class at Westminster called Helping Relationships, taught by Ed Welch. Dr. Welch talked a lot about what it meant to love people, and a few of the ideas that he introduced me to were the concepts of enjoying others and letting them move me. What he meant by this was that part of genuinely loving people means enjoying them. In other words, actively savoring being around them, the way you do when you're around a good friend who makes you laugh and brightens a bad day. Learning to enjoy another's presence is harder when you're with some people than with others, of course. Some people just seem to rub me the wrong way. But I began to see that if I wasn't actively searching for the good in other people and actively looking for something in them that I could appreciate, it was going to be practically impossible for me to love them.

The other concept Dr. Welch outlined for me was the idea of being moved by other people. Let me explain what he meant by this. For Welch, letting someone move you meant letting their words make an emotional impact on you – really letting them touch you inside and not letting what they were saying simply be water under the bridge. Another way of putting it might be to talk about being fully present in your interactions with others and really listening to what they have to say. As Dr. Welch talked about these things, I began to see how it was easy for me to be “nice” on the outside to people without really being moved by them. How easy it is to exchange pleasantries with someone, smile, and be polite, without really caring for them!

Maybe for you it seems like there's not much to be moved by in your conversations with people. They're just not telling you anything that's that interesting. At this point, it may be time to pause and ask yourself, “Why is that? Am I bored because I'm preoccupied with things in my own life, or is it because this person is just not telling me the full story?” Engaging stories nearly always involve conflict, and anyone who has any age on them will have stories of heartbreak and suffering and relational difficulties and spiritual struggles. Whether they choose to share them with you will depend very much on whether they feel they can trust you.

More thoughts about how to actively love people to follow next week...stay tuned!

Worship: Where Wise Leadership Begins

This week I wanted to write a little bit about the big picture of leadership (and life in general), because I think we tend to lose the grander vision in the midst of the paperwork, chores, and relational nitty gritty that fills our every day lives. At some point, we all ask ourselves questions like, “Why are we here?”, “Who are we?”, and “What were we made for?” There are countless possible answers a person could give in response to those questions, but as Christians, I think the overarching answer for us has to do with worship.

As a child in Sunday school, I remember being told that to worship meant “to ascribe worth to something.” While this helped communicate the idea that worship is about saying something is great, it didn't quite click for me what this ought to feel like or look like. Did worship mean that I was supposed to go around all day saying things like, “God is awesome!”? I wasn't sure. Maybe, but that definitely didn't sound like something I would be comfortable doing.

Now that I'm older, I'm finally starting to understand a little more what worship is about and why I didn't quite “get it” when I was younger. Today, if someone asked me what worship is, I'd probably ask them to picture a time when they felt really awed and amazed by something in nature.

For me, this brings to mind the time my friends and I visited the coastal town of Tintagel in southern England (a portion of the coastline is pictured above). We stayed at a youth hostel at the top of some rocky cliffs that overlooked the sea. The sunset on the first evening was breathtaking. The tall grass growing on the cliffs swayed gently in the breeze as the sun turned the water into liquid gold and began its slow descent into the sea. We could hear the waves crashing against the rocks below, and above us, a few gulls circled in the sky, soaring gracefully through the air. I was so absorbed in the moment that all I could think about was how beautiful it all was. In a sense, I lost myself in the beauty of that moment. I felt peaceful and also a bit awed at the glory of creation. I wasn't worrying about what I'd do tomorrow, or whether so-and-so liked me, or what I was going to have for dinner. How could I think about those things when I had something this amazing set out in front of me to enjoy?

That experience helped me understand something of what worship is like. Worship happens when we are so intently focusing on something or someone else that we are freed from thinking about ourselves. It is what we do when we are completely enamored with someone or something.

That is what God calls us to – lives of worship. We are not here to worship the creation, however beautiful it may be. We are not here to worship success, popularity, money, ease, pleasure, or comfort, though we often fall into the temptation of worshiping such things. We are here to worship the true and the living God, the One who sent his Son to live a perfect life for us, because we could not, and then to die in our place, be raised from the dead, and to go to heaven to present his perfect sacrifice before the Father and to sit at His right hand so he could pray for us and intercede on our behalf.

Worship is about being so taken with the glory, beauty, love, and perfection of our Savior that we can't help but praise him. It's about losing ourselves in something much greater and better than ourselves. And the funny thing is that in losing ourselves, we find ourselves. We remember what we are really here for, and who we were made for, and what really should be the most important thing in our lives. Returning to worship is really the only way we can remember how amazing God is, and why we should serve and honor him, whether in church ministry, at home, at work, or anywhere else.

At the end of the day, worship is the refreshment we need to recuperate from life's toils and difficulties. As King David put it so marvelously, “It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O LORD, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy” (Psalm 92:1-4).