Discipleship Begins with Active Listening

The interplay between listening and obedience expresses itself in our lives all the time. Sound has the ability to “command” us, to summon a response in us, forcing us to take notice. 

Unlike visual stimuli, certain sounds have an invasive, inescapable quality to them, and we don’t have “earlids” to protect us from them. Our sense of hearing is the alarm system of our bodies. As neuroscientist Seth Horowitz writes, our brains process threatening sounds in a tenth of a second, “elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is…