We have to keep asking ourselves: 'What does it all mean? What is God trying to tell us? How are we called to live in the midst of all this?' Without such questions our lives become numb and flat.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of introspection and seeking deeper meaning in life.
Henri Nouwen's quote highlights the necessity of self-reflection and questioning our existence and purpose. He suggests that by actively engaging with profound questions about life and spirituality, we can avoid the dullness of a superficial existence and truly understand our calling and the messages we receive from a higher power.
In practice
This quote can be used during a personal development workshop to encourage participants to reflect on their life choices.
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 – for us. And calling us to share in God’s 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.
Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)
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.
What is it to be a fool for Christ? It is to control one's thoughts when they stray out of line. It is to make the mind empty and free.
Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.
I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.
Rash indeed is he who reckons on tomorrow, or happily on the days beyond it; for tomorrow is not, until today is past.
Those who, like the beasts, have no such Hope, pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
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