This document discusses the importance and benefits of listening in relationships, especially marriage. It states that listening is the first work of love, as it allows us to understand others and give them our attention. True listening is active rather than passive and helps people analyze their own feelings. When we listen to our partners during their pain and frustrations, it releases power in the relationship and prevents trouble from developing. For a marriage to mature, listening is essential. The document emphasizes that humans have a deep need to feel heard and understood by others.

1. AGAPE IN AFRICA
MINISTRIES
LISTENING in living marriage,
"How beautiful, how grand and liberating this experience is, when people learn to
help each other. It is impossible to overemphasise the immense need humans have
to be really listened to. Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations
as well as between couples. In America people are paying others just to listen to
them over the telephone."
"We can, if we are able to listen as well as to speak, become better informed and
wiser as we grow older, instead of being stuck like some people with the same little
bundle of prejudices at 65 that we had at 25."
If we would love, we must listen to one another. This is the first work of love. In
listening we give ourselves to others. We give them our attention, we commit
ourselves to them."
"Creative listening is not passive but active; it communicates feelings of acceptance
and need. It encourages the other person to analyse his/her own feelings and,
miracle of miracles, to listen to him/herself. Creative listening involves empathy, the
skill of being able to get into another person's skin, to discover his/her underlying
motives, his/her emotional hungers. A little child was sent on an errand and was
gone longer than her mother thought proper. When she returned and was asked for
an explanation, she said, 'I met Mary and her doll was broken, so I stopped to help
her.' 'You mean you helped her fixed the doll?' her mother asked. 'No,' said the little
girl, 'I stopped to help her cry.' Creative listening is to weep sincerely with your mate
when he/she has been hurt, to enter into his/her pain and frustration, to penetrate
his/her loneliness at its deepest level. As you share one another's joys and woes,
power is released. Trouble has no opportunity to develop in this kind of
environment."
"LISTENING effectively means that when someone is talking you are not thinking
about what you are going to say when the other person stops. Instead, you are totally
tuned in to what the other person is saying."
"It is in LISTENING that marriage matures."
Makarios" [Greek word for "blessed" which means: "happy, enviably fortunate, and
spiritually prosperous-with life-joy and satisfaction in God's favour and salvation,
possessing the happiness produced by the experience of God's favour and especially
conditioned by the revelation of His grace, regardless of your outward conditions"]
(Math 5: 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,etc)
Thinus