When the Heart Waits Quotes

“Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”10”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“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. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife, having come upon that time in life when one is summoned to an inner transformation, to a crossing over from one identity to another. When change-winds swirl through our lives, especially at midlife, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self—our true self. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“To know exactly where you’re headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“To constantly relive the past is to miss out on the present.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“When we adopt this particular ego mask, we invest ourselves in the notion that those who shine the brightest are loved the most. This comes from the distorted idea that meaning and acceptance come from what we do, not who we are. We buy into the widespread notion that “light” emanates from our achievements, not from the divine fire within our soul.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Their hearts groan in many ways. And frankly, I believe we’ll all be better off when we take off our religious masks and become more human. Then we can get on with what really matters—the act of cupping our ears to one another’s hearts with compassion.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus gave him what seems like a harsh answer: “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matt. 8:21–22). But when you apply the answer to the process of inner transformation, it makes perfect sense. This is a call to separation. To “leave the dead.” In order to follow the inner journey, we need to leave behind those things that are deadening, the loyalties that no longer have life for us.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Patience is everything. RAINER MARIA RILKE”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait. . . .                           So the darkness shall be the light,                           and the stillness the dancing. T. S. ELIOT”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“The person who doesn’t love herself is usually the one who’s most preoccupied with herself, who’s most selfish.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Then he took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, “I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. 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. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.” Somehow I knew in my soul that his words were God’s words.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Dear God, I love this tree. I love the light filtering through the moss and the leaves. I love all your earth songs—the breeze rustling through the grass, the rhythm of crickets, the beating of wings. I love the rain water in the bird bath and the dragonflies that flit over it. I love the air so laden with moisture that the dew rains out of the tree and bathes my face. I love the artistic little prayers that the spiders weave through the woods. I love the way you blend daylight into darkness, how dusk softens the sharp edges of the world. I love the way the moon changes shape every night. I love the slope of your hills—horizons inside and out. I feel that I’m part of it, that it’s part of me. Here, surrounded and permeated by your creation, I feel you. I feel life. I know myself connected. O God, is there anything you’ve made that can’t pour life and healing into me? When I think of the simplicity and extravagance of creation, I want to bend down and write the word yes across the earth so that you can see it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you’ll see that they’re also the seedbed of creativity and growth—what allows us to do the daring and to break through to newness. As Thomas Merton observed, “The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”1 Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. Growth germinates not in tent dwelling but in upheaval. Yet the seduction is always security rather than venturing, instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“He waited actively—letting go, descending into the depths of his soul, listening, opening himself to change, praying.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“I believe that a healthy sharing of oneself is a holy call, but so is caring for ourselves and taking time for the beautiful mysteries God created within us. The important thing is balance. Being a martyr distorts the virtuous ideal of giving to others by crossing over into victim postures and a self-denial that squelches selfhood and the creative life of the soul.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Is there more to me than the roles I live out? Can I open up to my identity apart from them, to the knowledge that I’m more than the personas I create?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“In Christian language, this is plain, old-fashioned surrender—giving up our conscious will and striving, and yielding instead to the inner kingdom. The soul-work involved in this internal restructuring is, I believe, the deepest meaning of spiritual becoming.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“So it would happen to me and so it will happen to all who set out to knead their pain and wounds, their hopes and hungers, into bread. Waiting is the yeasting of the human soul.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“Brother Anthony leaned forward in his chair. “Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are,” he explained. “People recoil from it because they don’t want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“That is where God was to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience, but in the embracing of it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“To create newness you have to cover the soul and let grace rise.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

“For the apostles, it was Jesus’ crucifixion. The life that they had known with him was taken away. They felt numb, betrayed; it was as if the God they had invested everything in had vanished. They could no longer believe as they had before. Jones says that it’s as if their egoism were being burned out. Now the disciples have to go deeper and find a faith that allows them to live not only with the presence of Christ but with his seeming absence. They have to enter the darkness of their own doubts and come through to a faith that is true to where they are now.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions