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.
The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.
Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.
Take stock of your fears now and see how many of them are senseless. If you are honest with yourself you will probably find most of them are groundless.
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