README #1: What Battle Cry Taught Me About Hearing Accurately

First in README — a series on books worth reading, and what stuck.

I read Jason Wilson’s Battle Cry expecting a book about men and anger. It’s partly that. Wilson trains young men in martial arts, and he writes about what happens when boys learn early that most of their emotions are off-limits — how a lot of adult male anger turns out to be everything else, wearing the only mask it was ever allowed to wear. He compares suppressed emotions to “Ping-Pong balls under water”, which is about right. They don’t stay down, and they rarely surface at a convenient moment.

But that isn’t what I’m still thinking about months later. Two things stuck, and it took me a while to notice they’re the same thing: I have a hard time hearing accurately. Not hearing — hearing accurately. What my wife is actually saying, and what my own past actually was.

The Old Days Were Not Better

Wilson writes about men who get stuck on a version of themselves that no longer exists, and it sent me looking for a verse I half-remembered:

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions. (Ecclesiastes 7:10 NIV)

That verse has teeth in it. Not because remembering is wrong, but because the old days I compare today against are usually edited. I keep the good weather and lose the parts I complained about at the time. Or I run the edit the other direction and keep only the failures, which is the version I lived in for years.

That’s the confession in this post. I spent way too long as a defeated Christian, dwelling on my defeat instead of rejoicing in God’s victory. Not because I doubted the victory — I could have explained it correctly to anyone who asked. But the tape I played in my own head was a highlight reel of everywhere I’d fallen short, and a highlight reel is not the same thing as an accurate account. God had already dealt with the failures. I was the one still holding the file open.

Both edits, the golden past and the shameful one, are inaccurate in the same way. They’re a version I assembled, played back so often that it feels like memory.

What My Wife Is Actually Saying

The other thing I wrote down was four lines about listening, and I’ve returned to them more than anything else in the book.

Listen to what her heart is saying, not necessarily the words themselves. I’m an engineer by temperament. When someone says words to me, I process the words, because the words are the data. But the words are frequently just the packaging, and what’s inside the packaging is the thing that actually needs a response.

Believe that her words are not meant to hurt. Most of the damage in a conversation happens in the half-second where I decide what she meant. If I hear an accusation, I’m defending before she finishes her sentence, and then we’re having an argument I invented. Assuming good intent isn’t naivety. It’s extending the same benefit of the doubt I give myself constantly without noticing.

Don’t listen just to respond. Actually listen. I’ve been guilty of the version where I’m quiet, and I look attentive, and I’m really just waiting my turn with a rebuttal loaded. That’s not listening, it’s drafting. People can feel the difference even when they can’t name it.

Check your ego. Which is underneath the other three, honestly. Nearly every time I’ve listened badly, ego was somewhere in the room — wanting to be right, wanting to be understood first, wanting the thing to resolve in my favor.

The God OS Connection

Both kinds of accurate hearing land in the Walk, and both fail the same way when I run them on willpower. Patience with a spouse is on the fruit-of-the-Spirit list for a reason; it grows out of connection rather than effort. And hearing your own past accurately isn’t a mental discipline you master — it’s something the Gospel does to you, slowly, as you keep showing up. The daily ten minutes is where that happens for me. Confession clears the file. Praise re-tells the story with God as the main character instead of me.

So here’s the practice, small enough to actually do. One conversation this week: pick one of those four lines and carry it in. Not all four — one. And when the ego shows up mid-sentence, which it will, take that into the Confess doorway the next morning rather than filing it away for the highlight reel.

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash