Turn My Mourning Into Dancing Quotes

“Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness. No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love for humankind. There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Community, then, cannot grow out of loneliness, but comes when the person who begins to recognize his or her belovedness greets the belovedness of the other. The God alive in me greets the God resident in you. When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us. They are partial reflections of the great love of God, but reflections nevertheless. We see that gift precisely and only once we give up requiring that person to be everything, to be God. We see him or her as a limited expression of an unlimited love.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“I am less likely to deny my suffering when I learn how God uses it to mold me and draw me closer to him. I will be less likely to see my pains as interruptions to my plans and more able to see them as the means for God to make me ready to receive him. I let Christ live near my hurts and distractions.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Time has to be converted, then, from chronos, mere chronological time, to kairos, a New Testament Greek word that has to do with opportunity, with moments that seem ripe for their intended purpose. Then, even while life continues to seem harried, while it continues to have hard moments, we say, “Something good is happening amid all this.” We get glimpses of how God might be working out his purposes in our days. Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s work with us. Whatever happens— good things or bad, pleasant or problematic—we look and ask, “What might God be doing here?” We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points to Another and begins to speak to us of God. We”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation. In so doing, we become participants in the great battle against the powers of darkness. Our little lives participate in something larger.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life—even its sad moments—in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life’s hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully. And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“We seem to have a fear of empty spaces. The philosopher Spinoza called this a horror vacui. We want to fill up what is empty. Our lives stay very full. And when we are not blinded by busyness, we fill our inner space with guilt about things of the past or worries about things to come.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“But while presidents and popes came and went, while wars exploded and came to an end, while some lost their jobs only later to have their talents recognized, while children grew sickly and later became sports heroes, while all this and more transpired, something was being formed that neither death nor illness could destroy. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, much in our fleeting lives is not passing but lasting, not dying but coming to life, not temporary but eternal. Amid the fragility of our lives, we have wonderful reason to hope. Some call this hidden reality “grace,” others “God’s life in us,” others still “the kingdom of God among us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“We become so concerned with our identity that we preoccupy ourselves with our own unique distinction. We worry about how we are doing in comparison with others. This is the illusion that sets us on the road to competition, rivalry, and even violence. For it makes us conquerors who will fight for our place in the world, even at the cost of others. This illusion leads some to nervous activism, propelled by the belief that anyone is only the results of his or her work. The same illusion leads others to introspection with the assumption that they are their own deepest feelings.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Ultimately mourning means facing what wounds us in the presence of One who can heal.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“By inviting God into our difficulties, we ground life—even its sad moments—in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives, we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Learning how to die has something to do with living each day in full awareness that we are children of God, whose love is stronger than death.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Sometimes we feel trapped in our humanness. We experience keenly how things fall short of our expectations.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Pain suffered alone feels very different from pain suffered alongside another. Even when the pain stays, we know how great the difference if another draws close, if another shares with us in it.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“When our love grows from God’s love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don’t.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Through the generations there seems to run a chain of wounds and needs. And when we try to avoid inflicting wounds ourselves, we discover that even with our best intentions we cannot avoid encountering people who feel rejected, misunderstood, or hurt by us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“A prayerful life, then, is one in which we convert the world from darkness, people from mere roles to persons.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“If you see in me more than my function or job, then I can slowly communicate to you on a deeper level. I can become a person to you.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“When we become persons who transcend the limitations of our individual characters, the God who is love can reveal himself in our midst and bind us into a community.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Relate to people as a conqueror and they will hide their real nature from you. Violence is the brother and distrust the sister of this way of life.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“I need no longer always manage and muster support for my “cause.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“Gratitude springs from an insight, a recognition that something good has come from another person, that it is freely given to me, and meant as a favor.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“we find a place where people give one another grace.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

“To live and serve and worship with others thereby brings us to a place where we come together and remind each other by our mutual interdependence that we are not God, that we cannot meet our own needs, and that we cannot completely fulfill each other’s needs.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times