Want To Be Liked? Be A Good Sounding Board!

While making my daily mail deliveries to various departments in our local school district on Monday of this week, I happened to briefly visit with one of my good friends, Pat. She is one of several administrative secretaries who works in the district. She has three children, one of which is in college, the other child just graduated from high school, and the youngest is in middle school.

As two of her children are already considering the next step of leaving home, we got to talking about the empty nest syndrome. Pat had mixed emotions about her children leaving the safety of their home environment. She wanted them to succeed in life, but what would she do to fill the void when all of her children left home?

As we were talking, I suddenly saw tears flowing from her eyes. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that her two beloved chihuahua dogs had either escaped from her yard on their own, or someone had stolen them — she didn't know which. All she knew was, they were gone. Since Pat is a dog lover (as I am), I tried to console her as best I could. Since her dogs had microchip implants, as well as dog collars, I told her that I would pray that some kind soul, or her veterinarian, would soon locate them and return them to her.

My being a good sounding board in carefully listening to her above story, and being empathetic to her situation, helped her to cope with the possible loss of her precious dogs. Just having someone to tell her story to, provided her the hope and comfort she needed to carry on the rest of the day's activities.

Beloved, in our interaction with others, if we want to truly be liked, we must not only learn to be a good listener, but a good sounding board as well.

—Mike Riley, Gospel Snippets