Do you ever have a really long conversation with someone or several people and have a really satisfied feeling afterward?

You started the conversation with one thing and it naturally led to another which led to another and so on. As you converse, your energy increases instead of decreases. Maybe it’s 1:00am when you start and you’re both ready to fall asleep, but after 3 hours, your mind is racing with the thoughts and ideas you’ve been thinking through.

As they talk, your mind instantly converts their words into a response that you’re bursting to give.

Since I moved to Missouri, I haven’t gotten very many of these conversations. Finally, now that I have only one week left here, I got one of them.

Some of my family was in town, so we had several people all talking about things that are important for all of us. Some might call it a debate, but in reality, I saw it more of a group of people excited to share their thoughts on a subject. Everyone had their point of view, but everyone was ready to listen and understand what the other was saying.

Though I was just now struck with the annoyance of words. As my Bible teacher at The Master’s Mission often said: “communication is difficult, at best.” Such true words. There are often so many things that I want to be able to communicate, but having to do it in words is frustrating. They take something the wrong way, I correct the misperception, then they misperceive the correction and pretty soon we’re not talking about the subject anymore.

At times it can take you to an amazing world of rabbit trails, but sometimes it takes you to a rabbit hole you can never find your way out of. It’s a challenge to work on communication skills. To be able to communicate anything to anyone. To do it in a confident but humble way.

So many things often come back to communication. I’m blessed to be in a family with great communicators and conversationalists. We can have all manner of dialogue about the small and the big things in life.

All of this inspires me to continue working on my conversation skills. I need to start striking up random conversations with people. There are so many cool people out there with so many unique viewpoints and talking to them will allow me not only to get out of my comfort zone and work on my conversation skills, but it will also allow me to meet new people. Who knows, maybe one of the people I meet will end up being one of those 3-hour conversations.