Finding My Way Home Quotes

“When you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or you sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“When God looks at our world, God must weep. God must weep because the lust for power has entrapped and corrupted the human spirit. In the news and even in our families and ourselves we see that instead of gratitude there is resentment, instead of forgiveness there is revenge, instead of healing there is wounding, instead of compassion there is competition, instead of cooperation there is violence, and instead of love there is immense fear.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“Life is just a little opportunity for you during a few years to say, "I love you, too.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“God looks at us and weeps because wherever we use power to give us a sense of ourselves, we separate ourselves from God and each other, and our lives become diabolic, in the literal meaning of that word: divisive.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope. I am finding that when I choose to let go of my sometimes petty and superficial wishes and trust that my life is precious and meaningful in the eyes of God something really new, something beyond my own expectations begins to happen for me.

To wait with openess and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God molds us in love, holds us in tenderness, and moves us away from the sources of fear.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit

“There is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road and that others were more shrewd than we were. But don't be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little Flower that shows its Beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit