If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.
Interpretation
Fear can hinder close connections, while love fosters them.
This quote by Henri Nouwen highlights the dual nature of fear and love in human relationships. It suggests that fear acts as a barrier to intimacy, preventing individuals from fully opening up to one another, whereas love serves as a powerful ally that encourages vulnerability and connection, ultimately nurturing deeper bonds between people.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say, 'Remember, if fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.'
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.
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.
With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?
And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
No matter how much you know a human being, you don't know him enough.
Keep the other person's well being in mind when you feel an attack of soul-purging truth coming on.
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