listen!

I've really appreciated James' exhortation to be "quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger" and I've been trying to improve along those lines.  But I was caught up short recently when I unthinkingly cut my wife off by questioning one of my sons before she had finished saying something she was in the middle of saying.  Immediately I could tell that this was very hurtful to her and even though I apologized it took awhile to mend the relationship.  What was especially eye-opening to me was that my son told me that I had a habit of doing this,  Ouch!  Even though I can remember occasions in the past where I've interrupted or cut my wife off I never dreamed that this was actually a regular habit of mine, so much so that my son was calling me on it!  I'm so glad he did because I really needed that wake up call!

But, consider this.  Why did I need another male to tell me this for me to take it seriously?  My wife has told me in the past that I have this tendency and I sort of took it seriously, but not as much as when my son told me the same thing.  And it was my older brother, a medical doctor, who made me really take seriously the dysfunction I was experiencing in my marriage, although my wife had been telling me that for years.  Why is it that we men have such a hard time seriously listening to our wives, that we don't give their words as much credence as we do the words of our male peers?  If there's any place where we ought to be quick to listen and slow to speak it should be with our wives!
I'm convinced that listening to our wives is an important aspect of listening to God.  If I have said this before in one of my blogs I don't mind repeating it because this is so important:  God has given man two helpers:  woman and the Holy Spirit.  How well are we listening to them?  They both tend to speak more quietly than the louder male authorities that we are so quick to acquiesce to.  Like Elijah, we need to be reminded that God's preferred way of speaking is by a "still, small voice" more than by those louder means that males seem to prefer.  Even if our wives should raise their voices with us, or fail to meet up to our standards of what we think they should meet up to before we'll take them seriously, ultimately the voice we need to be tuning in to is that of the Father.  Are we listening . . . to Him . . . to His helpers . . . both of them?