In a span of two days I had similar encounters with three people: a phone call with a gifted world-travelling pastor, lunch with the leader of a growing denomination, and dinner with a popular Christian TV personality.

What they all had in common was them talking the whole time. The phone call was: I don’t have time to hear about your life, but here’s a half-hour update on mine. Lunch was me listening for an hour, then repeatedly saying I gotta go, and the leader following me all the way to my car, still talking. Dinner was with a group, where we were all feeling trapped inside an endless monologue.

My physiotherapist says the first thing they tell new physios is that “our eyes are lying to us”. You can’t assess how someone’s head, thorax, hips and feet are aligned by looking at them. You have to, for example, feel each pair of ribs with your fingers to know where they really are. Then what you feel retrains your eyes, and only then you can begin to accurately see it.

Reminds me of these verses:

• you will be ever seeing but never perceiving – Matthew 13:14; Acts 28:26
• they have closed their eyes – Matthew 13:15
• you have eyes but fail to see – Mark 8:18; Luke 8:10; John 12:40

What my eyes saw was fellow leaders who were ready to dialogue. What I felt was, “Are you OK? You’re talking a lot.” I should have paid attention to my feelings. These are obviously normal, hurting people, needing to process whatever was going on in their lives. Now I’m re-training my eyes to see people for who they are, not how they’re presenting.

Sometimes the way we do church gives us the impression that some people are more important or more put-together than others, based mostly on whether they can speak articulately for long periods of time. We’d be better off learning how to eat with each other in a way that honours everyone at the table, seeing our brothers and sisters, not as those having or not having certain gifts or positions. We need to retrain our eyes.