Hey, YOU! Listen to what I'm telling you OR How to make 30 Minutes become 2 1/2 hours without really trying

One of the "Instructionals" that some sojourners do is called the "Listening Lab."  The idea of a Listening Lab is to teach people how to have better listening skills.  In the book of James, chapter 1:19, James writes: "Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak."   There's an adage "I know you think you know what I said, but I'm not sure you heard what I think I'm saying."  In this adage is the idea that communication is oftentimes hindered by the speaker trying to communicate something to the hearer, BUT the hearer not understanding what it is that the person speaking is actually trying to communicate.  This is because I verbalize what I mean in ways effected by MY culture and MY upbringing using MY vocabulary using MY understanding of the meanings of the words I am using.  You, however, hear me through the interpretive filter of YOUR culture and YOUR upbringing through YOUR vocabulary using YOUR understanding of the meanings of the words I'm saying as YOU understand them.

A good illustration of this is in George Bernard Shaw's statement that the British and Americans are: "Two peoples separated by a common language."

Let's look at a car from the British and American point of view:

BRITAIN          AMERICA

bonnet               hood
boot                   trunk
silencer             muffler
windscreen       windshield
accumulator     battery
cubby box        glove compartment

You get the point.  If you are speaking to someone from Britain about your car, they might not understand some of what you think should be perfectly clear to anyone that speaks "English."

Anyway,  the listening lab is designed to teach people different skills to understand what someone is ACTUALLY saying.  Words, Tone, Body Language - these all go into truly understanding what someone is saying when they speak.  There are 10 different ways that your spouse, or parent, might say your name and they all mean something different just from the TONE of their voice.

Irene and I were trained LAST YEAR (2016) at the Camp Bee Workshop in Marshall, TX how to teach the Listening Lab.  In August of this year we helped to teach our first Listening Lab with Rick and Gail Northen at the Grayville church of Christ in Grayville, Illinois.

AUGUST 21st, 2017

Three days before the Listening Lab began was the Solar Eclipse.  The  "Totality Track" was only about 25 miles south of Grayville.  So, Irene and I decided to go down to watch the sun be totally eclipsed.  Two things were absolutely amazing.

1. Yes, it kept getting less and less light as the total eclipse approached.  "Well, DUH, Jim!"  But that isn't the amazing part.  It was still absolutely daytime and without special glasses or heavy welding glass or a "viewing box" you could NOT tell the the moon was eclipsing the sun.  It was more like the battery in a flashlight dying.  The light was getting less intense but there was still light.  I can see why thousands of years ago eclipses scared people.  The sun was still there, but WHY is it getting less and less radiant.

Here is the sun when about 95% eclipsed.  It was still plenty bright outside.  I'm having to take the picture through my "Eclipse Glasses" or I would destroy the CCD in the camera and turn the camera into an expensive paperweight.

This is the sidewalk under some trees.  The sunlight shining through the leaves shows up as Crescent because you see the moon blocking out the rest of the sun.  Here the sun is about 98% eclipsed,  Notice on the left where the sun is NOT going through leaves how bright it still is.  It is still very bright outside.

2.  Suddenly, and I mean B-O-O-M suddenly as the moon totally eclipsed the sun it was literally dark enough that you could see the bright stars in the sky.  Someone had turned out the sun.  Where we were the total eclipse lasted about 2 minutes.

In the picture above you see the moon covering the sun.  The "halo" is the corona of the sun's light shining AROUND the moon.  I took this picture through the eclipse glasses that we had purchased to watch the eclipse.

So, I got to check an item off of my "bucket list."  The one that I still haven't seen is a tornado.  I want to see a tornado out in a farmers field some day where it comes down for 5 seconds so I can see it and then goes up into the clouds again so no one gets hurt and nothing gets destroyed.

As I mentioned the eclipse totality zone was 25 miles south of Grayville, IL.  It took all of 30 minutes to get there but it took 2 1/2 hours for us to cover the same 25 miles coming back to the Trekker AFTER the eclipse due to the volume of traffic.

As I write this Irene and I are in Hawaii on the island of Oahu.  We just landed about 5 1/2 hours ago.  It's bedtime here.