Words written down can at times make difficult thoughts feel effortless. As a verbal processor, I find that writing allows me to not only process those incessantly spinning wheels, but I can stop, read back, and more fully understand my own inner workings, simply by evaluating what was just penned.
Words spoken feel a bit weightier. Once spewed into existence, there is no backspace button that can relieve an untimely, or not fully thought through sentiment. Thoughts are poured out without an ability to trace back and examine. You can think on what you uttered aloud, but the words will most likely be a paraphrase, and we often think better of ourselves in retrospect than we should.
Conversation truly is an art. To speak is to be aware of not only yourself, but your hearer. More than processing your own thoughts, conversation means to hear the thoughts of another, and be willing to actually listen rather than just use their words as a gap for you to merely formulate more of your own. Conversation becomes essential to knowing how to truly serve someone, and how to find both humility and confidence.
Though conversation has been lost.
We have replaced it with social media rants, self promotion, day-in-the-life-of content, and toneless texts. Words, meant to be formulated inside the context of conversing, have instead become platforms for opinion and branding.
This is in part why we began The Living Room, and although how exactly it will look in the months to come, we know that conversation has far too much value to be so quickly lost.
On Friday evening we engaged in a second conversation around racism, but this time within the context of the church. We would love for you to be a part of the conversation, even if from a distance. May The Living Room then be a picture to you of the joy and weight of the conversation that is to first begin in the most intimate of places, our homes, and in the most intimate of ways, together.
Watch it back by clicking the below image:
