"Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger"
James 1:19

This one is for me. It is a daily lesson I must be taught by Father God. It seems that it is one that we all need to be retaught on quite a regular basis. This is because we have a tendency to speak, a tendency to NOT listen, and then a tendency to become angered if we don't have a chance to speak or if we happen to hear enough to disagree with. But James seems to say that we have things backward. Being the fallen creatures we are, it is not a stretch to see how twisted we have made the process and our priorities.

James, Christ's half-brother, goes on to tell in chapter 2 that the tongue is "a restless evil" that is "filled with poisons" and sets the whole world on fire. He says that whoever can tame the tongue can control the rest of his body with ease. So why is it that speaking and anger come so easily but listening does not? The answer is easy: they focus on us. Speaking is our way of portraying our ideas, values, and beliefs about things, which we innately think are always right and, for the most part, infallible. Anger is the the way we describe what happens when we have been wronged but feel a surge within us rise up to right the wrong and rectify the injustice done to us. Then, if we don't have a chance to speak, only to listen, we feel we have been wronged because we didn't get the opportunity to put our 2 cents in, and, furthermore, may have totally disagreed with the one who was speaking, thinking that they were totally wrong and we are totally right. Both the desire to speak and the anger produced in the midst of all this are rooted in pride. We are consumed with our own ideas, our own rights, our own selves.

Let us pray that we are freed from the bondage of a self-worth that is really a disguised pride. Let us consider our brother as more important than ourselves. May we love God with everything in us, and our neighbors as ourselves. After all, if we love ourselves so much as to think we deserve the opportunity to speak and then to anger, then if we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, then we would put their values, ideas, etc... in a position of importance and therefore would be more inclined to, as James says, "be quick to hear."

May God be glorified in our conversations. Amen.