Henri Nouwen

Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.

The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.

Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.

Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.

Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others

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.

Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

Ministry in no way is a privilege...it is the core of the Christian life. No Christian is a Christian without being a minister.

The crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him.

My whole life I have been complaining _x000D_ that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered _x000D_ that my interruptions _x000D_ were my work.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.

Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let's be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

O Lord, make this Lenten season different from the other ones. _x000D_ Let me find you again. Amen.

Our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

Indeed, when God's glory dwells in me, there is nothing too far away, nothing too painful, nothing too strange or too familiar that it cannot contain and renew by its touch. Every time I recognize the glory of God in me and give it space to manifest itself to me, all that is human can be brought there and nothing will be the same again.

It is God’s passionate pursuit of us that calls us to prayer.

Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God's faithful love.