A Quote by Henri Nouwen
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.
Related Quotes
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Friends share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.
...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves.
Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.
When something goes wrong in our lives we often ask ourselves "Who was present?" and if there was ever a singular person that was present in whatever the event was when something changed our lives. If we can't get beyond that event, we become obsessed with it or it changed our life in a way that we can't make sense of. We often seek out that person because that was the last time our lives made sense.
A temple is a place in which those whom He has chosen are endowed with power from on high—a power which enables us to use our gifts and capabilities—to bring to pass our Heavenly Father's purposes in our own lives and the lives of those we love.
Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.
We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds - the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
The greatest barrier to own own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing.
Most of us know exactly what it is that creates the pain, confusion, stagnation and disruption in our lives. When we find something or someone creating in our lives that which we do not want, we must muster the courage and strength to stop it.
What's going on is that our most fundamental ideas about life are not serving us. They never have. But now, with our advances in communication and technology, the situation has become critical - for our mechanisms have outrun our mentality. And so we find ourselves trying to solve the dilemmas of tomorrow with the solutions of yesterday.
We are inspired by the God that we see in others and suddenly we find ourselves changing. We find ourselves giving more. We find that our lives become rather amazingly beautiful.
There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.
By all means, let us simplify the means of controlling time and the myriad details of our lives, but let us vigorously preserve our responsibility to direct our lives toward human accomplishment, rather than the pure accumulation of information.
Related Authors
Aiden Wilson Tozer Quotes
American
Priest
Billy Graham Quotes
American
Priest
Charles Spurgeon Quotes
British
Priest
Gordon B. Hinckley Quotes
American
Priest
Henry Ward Beecher Quotes
American
Priest
Joel Osteen Quotes
American
Priest
John C. Maxwell Quotes
American
Priest
John Piper Quotes
American
Priest
Max Lucado Quotes
American
Priest
Norman Vincent Peale Quotes
American
Priest
Pema Chodron Quotes
American
Priest
Pope Benedict XVI Quotes
German
Priest
Pope Francis Quotes
Argentinian
Priest
Rajneesh Quotes
Indian
Priest
Swami Vivekananda Quotes
Indian
Priest
Thomas S. Monson Quotes
American
Priest