Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love?' These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will be many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of love, forgiveness, and positivity in our daily interactions with others.
Henri Nouwen’s quote highlights the significance of reflecting on our daily actions and their impact on others. It prompts us to consider whether we have contributed positively by expressing peace, joy, healing, and love, encouraging us to let go of negativity and embrace a life that sows seeds of love, suggesting that even small acts of kindness can lead to substantial fruits both in this life and beyond.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a mindfulness workshop to encourage participants to reflect on their daily interactions.
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.
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.
The command is to love him, not just to think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship - for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God - without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman - legalistic and impersonal.
We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
I think every human being knows how to hate. Because if they didn't know how to hate how to hate they wouldn't know how to love.
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