The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
Interpretation
Self-rejection is a deeper and more harmful trap than the pursuit of external successes.
This quote by Henri Nouwen emphasizes that the most significant obstacle we face in life is not our failure to achieve success, popularity, or power; rather, it is the failure to accept ourselves and embrace our own worth. Self-rejection leads to feelings of unworthiness and can prevent us from achieving genuine happiness, regardless of our external achievements.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-acceptance.
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.
Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted; the second wilfully preferred.
There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
In the practice of sitting meditation you relate to your daily life all the time. Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds. It enables us to relate to our lives as something workable.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.