Devotions from Henri Nouwen’s book, The Inner Voice of Love

As we find the treasure of God’s love we may not be ready to fully own it. Many attachments keep pulling us away. If we fully owned our treasure we would hide it in the field where we found it, and go sell everything to buy the field.

Only when we have let go of everything else can the treasure be completely hours. Just finding the treasure puts us on a new quest for it. If we expose the treasure to others without fully owning it, we can harm ourselves and lose the treasure.  The spiritual life is a long search for what we have already found. The desire for God’s unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love. A newfound love needs to be nurtured in a quiet , intimate space.  We must hide the treasure and buy the field where we have hidden it. This is often painful as the sense of who we are is so connected to all the things we own: Success, friends, prestige, money, degrees, etc.  But we know that nothing but the treasure can satisfy us. May we journey to the place where we can truly rest…and that is in His love.