My ears aren’t so good any more; they haven’t been for some
time. I think I started loosing my
hearing right after the first bad incident I had with electricity back when I
was in college doing refrigeration work during the summer time. Any way, I really notice it when I wear
headphones, one sounds like it’s turned way up and the other is seems as though
it’s only up half way. I found that I
have to wear both in one ear in order for the balance to not be messed up. It’s kind of weird looking, but it works for
me. The thing that has really been the
hardest about the loss of my hearing is that I have a hard time having a
conversation in a crowd or hearing a person speaking at a distance in a crowded
room. Funny, I’m more comfortable in
front of a crowd than in the midst of one, at least up at the front I don’t
have to worry about what the other guy is saying.
Funny though it sounds, I think God blessed me through the
loss of my hearing. One of the first
things I had to do was to learn how to compensate in crowded situations. There were times when I would completely miss
someone saying something to me, even my wife, that couldn’t end up good. I found that the only way I could hear people
was to really focus on them. I had to be
looking straight at them, something I really didn’t do well. I have never been really good at paying
attention to people, always had too many things going in my head to much care
what others were saying… another thing that was bound to end poorly. I had to learn how to actually listen to
people; start to learn, I’m still learning.
Over the years I have gotten better at hearing conversations and voices
in crowds, not by concentrating harder on the sounds people make, but by
reading what their lips told me. That
has been a huge blessing for me, it’s taught me to clear away, if only for a
few short minutes, all the distractions in my head so that I can share an
unrepeatable moment with someone else.
Dear Father God… Thanks for the blessings on the side of my
head.
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