When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions (Plus)

by Sue Monk Kidd

She was that part of me that had little self-validation or autonomy, who tended to define life by others and their expectations, by collective values and projections. As a woman I sometimes felt that I had been scripted to be all things to all people.

Is it possible, I asked myself, that I’m being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a new passage in the spiritual life—the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self—the one God created me to be? Am I being compelled to disturb my inner universe in quest of the undiscovered being who clamors from within?

Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.

be your true, unfettered, God-given self, regardless of the expectations hammered into you.

When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up.

The natural gradient in us is toward growth. Whatever we use repeatedly and compulsively to stop that growth is our particular addiction.

was learning that being still and waiting in one place—going not forward but inward—was the sort of progress that really counted, the sort that gave us wings.

that facing pain wasn’t nearly so terrible as avoiding it.

For me, faith was believing that the God who whirled the darkness in me would also create the radiance. So I waited.

the central question of Christian life. But the soul is more than something to win or save. It’s

the seat and repository of the inner Divine, the God-image, the truest part of us.

So if all those roles were suddenly stripped away, what would be left? Who would you be then?

This comes from the distorted idea that meaning and acceptance come from what we do, not who we are.

We can endure, transcend, and transform the storminess when we see the meaning and mystery of it.

if we understand the source of the crisis. There are three basic sources: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings.

While leading a women’s retreat, I mentioned the “voice of Aunt Em” that

We are caught between the ‘now’ and the ‘not-yet’ of our identity,” notes Alan Jones.13

I decided to let go of letting go and wait on God to work within me.

Accepting that gift is accepting God’s will for us, and in its acceptance is found the path to growth and ultimate fulfillment.”3

stab of stunned injustice that we all get when life delivers a fiery arrow and the “world” we’ve spent our lives creating and believing in starts to burn.

the tugs between what the ego wants and that to which the True Self calls us.

time isn’t a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell.