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Diversity

It is funny how life seems to run in patterns sometimes. The other day I blogged about a sermon I heard that disturbed me because I thought it was sending misleading messages about communicating with people, and today my employer held a class on listening skills!

It was called "Listening in a Hectic World" and was comprised of short videos illustrating typical on-the-job situations which the class then discusses and analyzes. Being Aspie, I find these classes very helpful because they give concrete examples of good and bad interactions.

One of the points that the accompanying training manual brought up is how we often allow our biases to affect how we listen to people. Now, we have been studying Acts at church, which is somewhat relevant, because it talks about how two very different groups of people had to learn to adjust to each other. But Acts only takes it so far. It's very one-sided. The reason that the barriers came down between certain Gentiles and certain Jews is that they became something new. They were no longer Gentiles or Jews but Christians. All well and good, but it tells only half the story. For Gentiles who remained Gentiles and Jews who remained Jews, the barriers were still up. There was very little interaction between the new Christians and the other two groups other than missionary activity on the part of the Christians. The information only flowed one way.

When I entered the work world I was a zealous Christian, thoroughly indoctrinated in the Bible. I knew what to think about my peers who were not Christian in the way I was Christian. I knew what to think about my peers who followed lifestyles not approved by the Bible. And right away I ran into big trouble in the form of a man named James. James was a very effeminate homosexual who had an attitude toward Christians. Even though he and I had never had a conversation on the subject (or on any subject), the very fact that I was a very vocal Christian was enough to turn him against me. Or so I surmise that was the reason. Because the man never once said a word to me. Well, what's the big deal? The big deal was that James had vital information that I needed to do my job. He worked in IT (information technology). By refusing to speak to me, by turning his back on me, if he was the only one in the IT room, I could not get my job done! Did I go to my supervisor? Oh, yes. She said, "Well, you can't be friends with everyone." Being friends wasn't the issue. I could care less about being friends. I just wanted to be able to do my job.

Eventually James left the company, and I don't know what became of him. But it was incidents like these that made me realize that much of what I had been taught in church and Bible study was not only wrong, it was detrimental to my career. Over the three decades that I have been at this particular workplace I have had to learn how to work with a variety of people from all walks of life and all over the world. Seeing them as potential souls to be won is not the way to go about doing so.

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Spinning Compass
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