More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 24, 2022 - October 4, 2023
If that is true, then the real question for me as I consider my own death is not: how much can I still accomplish before I die, or will I be a burden to others? No, the real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others?
Furthermore, your belovedness preceded your birth. You were the beloved before your father, mother, brother, sister, or church loved you or hurt you. You are the beloved because you belong to God from all eternity.
God loved you before you were born, and God will love you after you die. In Scripture, God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3, JB).
You belong to God from eternity to eternity. Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, “I love you, too.”
The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will never get lost—not even our mortal bodies.
The truly good news is that God is not a distant God, a God to be feared and avoided, a God of revenge, but a God who is moved by our pains and participates in the fullness of the human struggle.
Easter brings the good news that, although things seem to get worse in the world, the Evil One has already been overcome.
Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father. The Return of the Prodigal Son
But when you fully own your pain and do not expect those to whom you minister to alleviate it, you can speak about it in true freedom. Then sharing your struggle can become a service; then your openness about yourself can offer courage and hope to others.
If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and is offered to us in love.
In Jesus Christ, God has entered into our lives in the most intimate way, so that we could enter into his life through the Spirit.
By the discipline of prayer we are awakened and opened to God within, who enters into our heartbeat and our breathing, into our thoughts and emotions, our hearing, seeing, touching, and tasting. It is by being awake to this God within that we also find the Presence in the world around us.
In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us. In solitude we can listen to the voice of him who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone.
When Jesus spoke these words on the cross, total aloneness and full acceptance touched each other. In that moment of complete emptiness all was fulfilled. In that hour of darkness new light was seen. While death was witnessed, life was affirmed.
While being so busy running my own life, I become oblivious to the gentle movements of the Spirit of God within me, pointing me in directions quite different from my own.
To pray means to open your hands before God.
In prayer, you encounter God not only in the small voice and the soft breeze, but also in the midst of the turmoil of the world, in the distress and joy of your neighbor, and in the loneliness of your own heart.
The Jesus Prayer[4] or any other prayer form, is meant to be a help to gently empty our minds from all that is not God, and offer all the room to him and him alone.
Then we can affirm Luther’s words, “Grace is the experience of being delivered from experience.”
Today I imagined my inner self as a place crowded with pins and needles. How could I receive anyone in my prayer when there is no place for them to be free and relaxed?
Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me. And what you want to give me is love— unconditional, everlasting love. Amen.
Indeed, God wants to be admitted into the human heart, received with open hands, and loved with the same love with which we have been created.
Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and ask him more directly to give you joy, peace, and a pure heart. Purity of heart means a heart where God is the center of your attention.
But once we have found the center of our life in our own heart and have accepted our aloneness not as a fate but as a vocation, we are able to offer freedom to others.
We can only perceive the stranger as an enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we say, “Please enter—my house is your house, my joy is your joy, my sadness is your sadness, and my life is your life,” we have nothing to defend, since we have nothing to lose but all to give.
Just as no great travels are necessary to see the beauty of creation, so no great ecstasies are needed to discover the love of God. But you have to be still and wait so that you can realize that God is not in the earthquake, the storm, or the lightning, but in the gentle breeze with which he touches your back.
