Hearing with our ears and our hearts

I was in court earlier this week and we were discussing one of our kiddoes, a young teenager. This girl is in care because her adoptive mom doesn’t feel like she can care for her needs any longer. One of the attorneys in the hearing asked my worker something along the lines of does the child understand that her mother is not able or willing to care for her. To which my sweet worker responded, “Whether she listens with her heart and not just her ears, I can’t answer.”

Whether she listens with her heart and not just her ears, I can’t answer. Because what this little girl heard with her heart, back when she was initially adopted, was “I love you and I will always be your family.” And what she is hearing now with her ears is a different message.

A friend of mine is going through an unexpected divorce right now. And she is struggling with the fact that as angry as she is with her husband, she still has feelings of love for him. Because what she heard with her heart back when they married was “I love you and I’ll be here always.” And what she is hearing now with her ears is a different message.

I listened to a podcast this week with a female Methodist pastor who grew up and spent her early adult years in an evangelical church. And when she was young, she heard the message in her heart that she would use her voice to serve God, but as she grew older and became an adult, what she heard with her ears was a different message.

These are all times of protecting the positive message we hold in our heart from the negative one that we hear with our ears. But how often does it work just the opposite?  How often do we hold a negative message in our heart, placed there because of past abuse, or shame, or societal expectations?  And no matter how different the message is that comes to us after, we only hear it with our ears and not with our hearts.

What I know about myself is that I have a hard time accepting when people say positive things about me. Because the message that I hold in my heart is that I’m not worthy or I’m not enough. And when I hear a message that is different from that, I tend to only hear it with my ears, because my heart has a hard time believing something different than the message that it already holds. My heart has so embraced the negative messages that it has a hard time accepting a different message of love and acceptance.

I know that I’m not the only person who feels this way. I see it often in my friends, especially my female friends. Very often I see it in the parents and children with which I work each day. I see it in every population that is marginalized or rejected or judged.

I guess the lesson in this is that it’s important for us to listen with both our ears and our heart. Sometimes the message will be a healing one. Sometimes it will be a difficult one that will break our heart. But until our heart breaks over hard truth, it cannot heal in the real truth. That God loves us just as we are. With all our broken pieces. With all our wrong messages. With all our hurt places. And if we let him, he will glue all those broken pieces back together, replace those wrong messages with right ones, and apply balm to those hurt places.

That is a message that we can hear and believe with our ears and with our hearts.