You Are the Beloved: 365 Daily Readings and Meditations for Spiritual Living: A Devotional
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we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-with-you.’ I will wipe all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:2–5).
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Once I have accepted the truth that I am God’s beloved child, unconditionally loved, I can be sent into the world to speak and to act as Jesus did.
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Act ahead of your feelings and trust that one day your feelings will match your convictions.
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When we have cursed ourselves or allowed others to curse us, it is very tempting to explain all the brokenness we experience as an expression or confirmation of this curse.
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The great spiritual call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing.
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when we keep listening attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, it becomes possible to live our brokenness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an opportunity to purify and deepen the blessing that rests upon us.
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Physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under the blessing is experienced in ways radically different from physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under the curse.
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When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection….As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.”…My dark side says, “I am no good….I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned.” Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ...more
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As long as we belong to this world, we will remain subject to its competitive ways and expect to be rewarded for all the good we do. But when we belong to God, who loves us without conditions, we can live as he does. The great conversion called for by Jesus is to move from belonging to the world to belonging to God.
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the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?”
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Fear, as well as anger, when we look at them in solitude and quiet, reveal to us how deeply our sense of worth is dependent either on our success in the world or on the opinions of others. We suddenly realize that we have become what we do or what others think of us.
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When God has become our shepherd, our refuge, our fortress, then we can reach out to him in the midst of a broken world and feel at home while still on the way. When God dwells in us, we can enter into a wordless dialogue with him while still waiting on the day that he will lead us into the house where he has prepared a place for us (John 14:2). Then we can wait while we have already arrived and ask while we have already received.
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If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.
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Instead of saying: “Nothing matters anymore, since I know that God exists,” the converted person says: “All is now clothed in divine light and, therefore, nothing can be unimportant.”
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there is little doubt in my mind that the experience of being filled yet unfulfilled touches most of us to some degree at some time. In our highly technological and competitive world, it is hard to avoid completely the forces that fill up our inner and outer space and disconnect us from our innermost selves, our fellow human beings, and our God.
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One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.
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The Lord always reveals himself to you where you are most fully present. In your prayer, try to present your anxieties, struggles, and fears to him, and let him show you the way to follow him. More important than anything else is to follow the Lord. The rest is secondary.
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Can I give without wanting anything in return, love without putting any conditions on my love? Considering my immense need for human recognition and affection, I realize that it will be a lifelong struggle. But I am also convinced that each time I step over this need and act free of my concern for return, I can trust that my life can truly bear the fruits of God’s Spirit.
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Instinctively we know that the joy of life comes from the ways in which we live together and that the pain of life comes from the many ways we fail to do that well.
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The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
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in our world we are constantly pulled away from our innermost self and encouraged to look for answers instead of listening to the questions.
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Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.
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When we know that God loves us deeply and will always go on loving us, whoever we are and whatever we do, it becomes possible to expect no more of our fellow men and women than they are able to give, to forgive them generously when they have offended us, and always to respond to their hostility with love. By doing so we make visible a new way of being human
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Laying our hearts totally open to God leads to a love of ourselves that enables us to give wholehearted love to our fellow human beings.
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it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.
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create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.
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The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations.
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Empty space tends to create fear. As long as our minds, hearts, and hands are occupied, we can avoid confronting the painful questions to which we never gave much attention and that we do not want to surface….
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Around the table, we know whether there is friendship and community or hatred and division. Precisely because the table is the place of intimacy for all the members of the household, it is also the place where the absence of that intimacy is most painfully revealed.
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The] intimacy of marriage itself is an intimacy that is based on the common participation in a love greater than the love two people can offer each other.
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The real mystery of marriage is not that [two people] love each other so much that they can find God in each other’s lives, but that God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminders of God’s divine presence. They are brought together, indeed, as two prayerful hands extended toward God and forming in this way a home for God in this world.
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Children are strangers whom we have to get to know.
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Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
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And so the main question becomes: how do we set our hearts on the Kingdom first when our hearts are preoccupied with so many things? Somehow a radical change of heart is required, a change that allows us to experience the reality of our existence from God’s place.
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O Lord, look with favor on us, your people, and impart your love to us—not as an idea or concept, but as a lived experience.
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What matters is to listen attentively to the Spirit and to go obediently where we are being led, whether to a joyful or a painful place. Poverty, pain, struggle, anguish, agony, and even inner darkness may continue to be part of our experience. They may even be God’s way of purifying us. But life is no longer boring, resentful, depressing, or lonely because we have come to know that everything that happens is part of our way to the Father.
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God wanted to liberate us, not by removing suffering from us, but by sharing it with us. Jesus is God-who-suffers-with-us.
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It helps me to think about painful rejections, moments of loneliness, feelings of inner darkness and despair, and lack of support and human affection as God’s pruning.
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Suffering then becomes a way of purification and allows me to rejoice in its fruits with deep gratitude and without pride.
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As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others. Yes, you have to incorporate your pain into your self and let it bear fruit in your heart and the hearts of others.
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Taking up your cross means, first of all, befriending your wounds and letting them reveal to you your own truth.
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the truth is that my passion is a much greater part of my life than my action. Not to recognize this is self-deception and not to embrace my passion with love is self-rejection.
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A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old, that those who look forward to the returning Lord can discover him already in their midst.
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Not only did Jesus come to free us from the bonds of sin and death; he also came to lead us into the intimacy of his divine life.
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We are cynical about so much suffering in ourselves and in the world and we do not know how to integrate that with our spiritual aspirations.
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We feel ambivalent and dissatisfied, wondering if God can really be trusted and if God really is a personal God who is “close to the brokenhearted.”
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We aren’t questioning this with words, but our behavior betrays us.