The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
Interpretation
Realizing the difference between understanding love and actually experiencing it can take a long time.
This quote by Henri Nouwen reflects the idea that it's one thing to learn about love in an intellectual or theoretical sense, but it’s an entirely different challenge to open oneself up to love and vulnerability. The journey from merely teaching or understanding love to truly embodying it and welcoming it into one’s life can be a complex and often lengthy process, filled with personal growth and self-discovery.
In practice
During a relationship seminar, one might use this quote to illustrate the emotional hurdles people face.
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.
The fullness of our heart is expressed in our eyes, in our touch, in what we write, in what we say, in the way we walk, the way we receive, the way we serve.
Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart_x000D_ _x000D_ From its present pathway part not!_x000D_ _x000D_ Being everything which now thou art,_x000D_ _x000D_ Be nothing which thou art not._x000D_ _x000D_ So with the world thy gentle ways,_x000D_ _x000D_ Thy grace, thy more than beauty,_x000D_ _x000D_ Shall be an endless theme of praise,_x000D_ _x000D_ And love - a simple duty.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.
my love had grown one with my soul; it became darker, but did not go out
Everyone has to die. I'm not particularly scared about it. What really frightens me is that if I go before my wife, I will leave her alone, and vice versa. The ideal would be to die together.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
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