Today I was listening to a DVD of my pastor teaching from Matthew chapters 6 and 18, about forgiveness. My memory of when I heard it in person about two years ago was completely different than what I hear now. Ha ha. Does this say something about me and the way I listen? Probably. While I try to listen carefully to the message being given and stay in the train of thought, I do find myself hearing something, and trailing off in fairly concentrated thought about that thought line, and then I come back to the study, and I have to realize that I've missed some stuff and then I have to try and extrapolate, backwards, and put things together and catch up with the message and move on. I do this a lot. I zero in on something, and tend to concentrate on it and trail off until I've resolved it, and then I move on. I can't always do that. It doesn't work in the work environment for example. Chaos would ensue if I didn't stay on track amidst distraction. I have a couple of friends I chat with regularly online who are fairly brainy, and they may have no idea that I do this with them too, but the difference there is that I can scroll up and recapture the conversation when I've lost track. Thank goodness for the printed word. It certainly doesn't wash when I'm trying to listen to and communicate with my wife. She speaks to me and when, occasionally she sees my eyes break contact with hers, and I seemingly go, "off to another land," it really frustrates her. That might be a bit of an understatement. I understand that it upsets her. It upsets me if she does it. I just don't mean to do it.
The fact that the study seems different in radical ways, might also mean that the word is so rich with information for us to assimilate, that it takes time to do just that. We're limited beings. His Word isn't limited, or constrained by time or dimension, or by our ability or readiness to understand it. I'm sure that if I listened to this roughly hour-long DVD three times today, and had its content firmly grasped, that I could listen to it again, two years from now, and that I would find new stuff, or that I would gain fresh understanding of something I had heard before. He's just that way, the Word of God.

Rom 11:33-36
33 Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!
34 "For who has known the mind of the LORD?Or who has become His counselor?" 35 "Or who has first given to Him And it shall be repaid to him?"
36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen. NKJV