Asked and Answered

My friend, Danny, is writing an interesting series of letters to his children over at Dear Children--Letters from a Father's Heart. Nice idea. Good stuff. Worth the read. Recently he wrote Eight Things You Can Do To Be A Better Human Being. Good list. Again, worth the read.

I was struck by one.

6. Ask questions, listen to the answers

I was struck because usually you would put "Ask questions" and assume the rest. I was struck because that assumption is likely not a wise one.

I remember seeing a comic strip (although I can't recall its name) with two frames. One showed "the typical way women communicate" and showed a sequence: 1) Speak, 2) Listen to the response, and 3) respond to the response. The second frame was "the typical way men communicate". That was 1) Speak, 2) wait 'til her lips stop moving, 3) speak again. Of course, I think the sexism was unnecessary and I think the first frame was optimistic, but the point was/is that too many of us ask questions without listening to the answers.

We ask questions for a variety of reasons; getting answers is only one of them. We ask rhetorical questions to make a point. "Is the pope Catholic?" requires no answer. We ask opinion questions to express rather than obtain opinions. "Would it be good if I kill my neighbor for not observing the Sabbath?" We ask questions to mislead. "Yes or no: Have you stopped beating your wife?" We have lots of reasons for asking questions.

And you can often tell when the question isn't a question. "Do I have to clean my room today?" It's in the tone, the emphasis, the facial expressions. I remember once being asked by my supervisor to perform some tests. I wanted to ask him why, not because I was protesting the work, but because I wanted to find out what he wanted to discover. That was a tough question to word because normally when a subordinate (a worker, a child, whatever) is told to do something and asks, "Why?", it is not a question for information.

What do you suppose would happen if we took Danny's advice? "Ask questions, listen to the answers." What if, when we're being rhetorical, someone offered an answer, and we listened? What if we actually took in the responses to our pointed questions rather than laying them down as a gauntlet? What if, for instance, husbands used questions regularly to "live with your wives in an understanding way" (1 Peter 3:7)? What if we asked more questions to learn than to attack, impress, opine, or whatever other reasons we tend to use them? Well, I guess I'll just wait for answers.