Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)
Interpretation
Waiting can feel endless and unproductive, yet it is often a necessary part of our journey toward our goals.
In this quote, Henri Nouwen illustrates waiting as a barren and uncomfortable experience, akin to crossing a dry desert. It signifies the emotional and spiritual distance we often feel between our current situation and our desired destination, reminding us that this waiting period is part of the growth and maturation process necessary for personal development and achieving our aspirations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about perseverance and patience.
The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.
The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides in the immense sorrow that has gone before....our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.
Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering β for us. And calling us to share in Godβs suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.
To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.
Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.
The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love.
Everyday is a new life to a wise man.
Poverty with security is better than plenty in the midst of fear and uncertainty.
We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.