Leading people to a more intimate friendship with God
“For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life — pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures — and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always …
Continue reading “Let God Find You — A Quote by Henri Nouwen in “The Return of the Prodigal Son””
“‘What is my way to pray, what is the prayer of my heart?’ Just as artists search for the style that is most their own, so people who pray search for the prayer of their heart.” — Henri J. M. Nouwen, “The Only Necessary Thing”, p. 37 (originally from “Reaching Out”) Yes, the increasing discontent …
“The love of Jesus will give you an ever-clearer vision of your call… The more you are called to speak for God’s love, the more you will need to deepen the knowledge of that love in your own heart. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when …
“Prayer requires discipline. Discipline means to create boundaries around our meeting with God… Without discipline, unceasing prayer remains a vague ideal, something that has a certain romantic appeal but that is not very realistic in our contemporary world… Those who do not set aside a certain place and time each day to do nothing else …
“It is clear that we are usually surrounded by so much inner and outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God when God is speaking to us… A spiritual life requires discipline because we need to learn to listen to God… That is true prayer: being all ear for God. The core …
“In prayer… again and again we discover that the love we are looking for has already been given to us and that we can come to the experience of that love… There, in the first love, lies our true self, a self not made up of the rejections and acceptances of those with whom we …
“The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears, and to make our own deepest self known to us… Each time you let the love of God penetrate deeper into …
“Prayer… is listening to that voice — to the One who calls you the Beloved. It is to constantly go back to the truth of who we are and claim it for ourselves. I’m not what I do. I’m not what people say about me. I’m not what I have… My life is rooted in …
“The devil said: ‘You have to prove you are the Beloved…’ Jesus said: ‘I don’t have to prove I am the Beloved; I am already…’ The greatest obstacle to the Spirit working in us is that we say to ourselves we are useless, we are nothing. Once I know I am the Beloved, once I …
“The more we train ourselves to spend time with God and God alone, the more we will discover that God is with us at all times and in all places. Then we will be able to recognize God even in the midst of a busy and active life. Once the solitude of time and space …