Communication

I adapted a little bit this from an email I sent earlier this year and found it fitting for this blog.


It's inherent for all living things to strive to communicate. The night before Dayna passed away I was watching re-run of a show on TV last week about a guy who had Locked-in Syndrome." His mind was clear and his awareness acute, but the monitors he was hooked up to did not reveal brain activity. Around him, doctors were discussing with family members removal of life support and donation of organs. All he could do was blink. Doctors explained that was an involuntary action and served no real value and language connection. But inside, his need to communicate was intense. His very life depended on it. He began to blink his eyes as much as he could hoping that someone would notice. Finally someone did.

Communication began as simply as "blink twice for yes and once for no." But important medical decisions, letting needs be known to family, and decisions regarding life, could be made with that tiny connection to the people around him.

I often think of the story of the Tower of Babel and how the people perceived that they should build a great tower to glorify God. Yet, what they were actually doing was building the tower to glorify themselves. We know what happened. God became angry and confounded their language. People couldn't understand each other, which led to frustration, which led to isolation from their loved ones. Their attempts at seeking connection with the people around them fell short and their utterances are now known in the modern world as babble.

In the story of the tower, the people needed communication. I would guess that although important, their speech needs existed not just on a functional level (i.e. bring me a glass of water), but on an emotional level as well. It seems that most of them at least had body language, or the fluttering of eyes, to make their thoughts known, yet their frustrations led to their division from each other. Perhaps because in their inabilities it would take too much time to coordinate actions and words. Perhaps they became so caught up in glorifying themselves that they neglected to see and appreciate the most funamental of human needs.

What are our Towers of Babel? Maybe it's absorbing ourselves in sports. Or maybe it's our jobs. Perhaps computer games or the internet. Possibly headphones connected to Ipods or cell phones. Or on an ironic level, maybe it's getting schooled in the fundamentals of sociology, yet keeping our eyes closed so no one sees them flutter.

Puzzlingly, communication seemed to flow much easier when it was tougher to do. I remember a time when long letters were much anticipated, and when in receipt of such a letter, it warranted full attention and eyes glued to the pages, absorbing every word, envisioning the images that the words created. This has never been more fully appreciated when a letter from a far away missionary arrives.

The perils of modern communication such as email, facebook, family websites, etc. has been that we cannot see the eye flutters. Body language is nonexsistent. Inflections and tone are often misunderstood. Instead of a thoughtful letter, we sometimes get hasty texts, or a picture message as a subsitute for the thousand words we intended to write. And somewhere in all of this, we have seemingly lost our identity. On message boards, comments to articles, chat rooms, etc. we can become nothing more than a username and an IP address. Often hateful and vengeful responses that we would never say face-to-face have become commonplace in our fast paced world because no one knows who we are. So it would seem that in our efforts to make a name for ouselves, all we have really accomplished is encouraging our legacy as the unknown, which is culminated and supported by the babble that we have become surrounded with. And soon, the small sentence, "I am doing the dishes" becomes a substitute for "I'm really struggling right now and I cannot seem to get myself out of these emotions I'm feeling. I really need someone to tell me that it's going to be okay and that things are going to get better." And the response, "Fun stuff" seems to be devestating when one wanted comfort of, "It's going to be all right. The Lord loves you and if thou endure it well, you shall be exalted on high." But the responder didn't see the tiny, almost inconspicous eye flutter when the poster typed in the word "dishes."

President Thomas S. Monson recently counseled:

“Often we assume that [the people around us] must know how much we love them. But we should never assume; we should let them know. . . . We will never regret the kind words spoken or the affection shown. Rather, our regrets will come if such things are omitted from our relationships with those who mean the most to us” (“Finding Joy in the Journey,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2008, 86).

So how do we demonstrate our love? I have learned that 90 percent of life is just showing up. Perhaps the hardest part is actually, physically, transporting oneself to attendance at not only the important events, such as graduations and weddings, but also attending gatherings at the church, going out to lunch with my husband, or doing acts of service for someone. I will say that social networking sites, such as Facebook and blogs, have helped me reconnect with old high school friends, get to know relatives better, and bond over the sharing of ideas, but I think there's a whole lot more to be said for the warm hug from a nervous and excited nephew's fiancee, the tiny dimple in my brother's cheek which he tries to hide but sneaks out when he laughs, the wink from my husband across the room, how I know my daughter is stressed when she rubs her bottom lip, oohing over crochet stitches with my mother-in-law, sharing a porch swing with my sister, watching my 78 year-old mother delight in Splash Mountain at Disney, realizing how much I enjoyed reconnecting with my cousins, and hugging someone during grief and realizing that it isn't just your tears that are falling.

Of the five senses, technology can only transmit two effectively. The other three take effort to see the fluttering in someone's eye. And maybe this is how the Lord feels when our prayers become redundant, rehearsed and full of mundane babble. He wants to know us, and the only way we can let Him know us is by communicating with Him often. Could it be possible that the efforts made to communicate with the ones we love are training and exercises to teach us how to communicate with God?