The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
Interpretation
Realizing the difference between understanding love and actually experiencing it can take a long time.
This quote by Henri Nouwen reflects the idea that it's one thing to learn about love in an intellectual or theoretical sense, but it’s an entirely different challenge to open oneself up to love and vulnerability. The journey from merely teaching or understanding love to truly embodying it and welcoming it into one’s life can be a complex and often lengthy process, filled with personal growth and self-discovery.
In practice
During a relationship seminar, one might use this quote to illustrate the emotional hurdles people face.
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.
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.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.
You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.
Nothing prepared me for your smile
I arise from dreams of thee_x000D_ _x000D_ In the first sweet sleep of night,_x000D_ _x000D_ when the winds are breathing low,_x000D_ _x000D_ and the stars are shining bright.
Through all of youth I was looking for you_x000D_ without knowing what I was looking for_x000D_ part memory part distance remaining _x000D_ mine in the ways that I learn to miss you_x000D_ from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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