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.
Interpretation
Listening requires deep internal stability and selflessness.
This quote emphasizes the challenge of truly listening to others, suggesting that it demands a level of inner peace and confidence that allows individuals to set aside their own need for validation. To be a true listener means being open and accepting without the desire to dominate conversations or assert one's own viewpoints.
In practice
During a team meeting, one could use this quote to encourage colleagues to listen more actively to each other's ideas.
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.
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.
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.
When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.
The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.
He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.
Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance.
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