You Never Asked

Most of us have vivid memories of personal interchanges in which some profound truth or deep secret emerges to our surprise. When we ask “Why have you never shared this before”, the response is often: “You never asked.” And our response might be: “I didn’t know you were ______ (fill in the blank – married, divorced, pregnant, gay, poor, rich, that old, that young, a Buddhist, a Mason, an atheist, or a Lutheran!)

And so it is with getting to know another person. Many important truths, secrets, or facts lie just behind the Ask The Question door, sealed off from us and the world until someone cares enough to ask. We, like them, do not bare our soul to the world, for that would be destructive. We require a person to pay the price of admission into our inner life, which is love, trust, and ASKING.

An important part of active listening is to ask people questions, and that we can engage people most effectively by asking questions that relate to their personality type:

* To Head people (thinkers), we can ask information-oriented questions to better understand what they think, understand, and believe.
* To Heart people (feelers), we can ask questions related to how they feel about God and other issues.
* To Hands people (action-oriented), we can ask questions that relate to the person’s sense of purpose as it relates to spiritual matters.
Finally, remember that Jesus commands us to ask, and to ask of Him and the Father:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Matthew 7: 7,8,11