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

Today’s devotion is on befriending our emotions. It can be discouraging to discover how quickly we can lose our inner peace. Maybe someone enters our lives who creates anxiety within us. Or maybe we thought we were centered and could stay with God, but then someone we hardly know makes us feel insecure. Then we start asking ourselves if we are loved or not, and that person becomes the criterion. We don’t need to be hard on ourselves or make it more difficult to come home again to love. But we don’t have to repress our emotions either. We can acknowledge them and let them pass by. In a way, we have to befriend them so that we don’t become their victim. The way to victory is not to try to overcome those emotions but in building a deeper sense of safety and at-homeness and a more incarnate knowledge that we are deeply loved. Then little by little, we will stop giving so much power to a stranger.
We can be sure that God will truly fulfill all our needs. If we hold on to that, we will not expect that fulfillment from people who we already know are incapable of giving it.

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

 Jesus became flesh for us so we could encounter Him in the flesh and receive His love in the flesh.

But sometimes our shame and our guilt prevent and block His presence in our lives. We may not feel fully at home in our bodies and wish we were good enough, looked more beautiful, or were more pure. Our lives may be filled with fears and we may feel we need permission to be ourselves. But Jesus was totally free before the authorities of His time. He told the people not to be guided by the behavior of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus came to free us from our doubts and fears and bonds. He wants to create in us a space where we can be with Him and live in the freedom of His children. We need not be discouraged that we cannot change ourselves but rather enter in to the presence of Jesus as we are and ask Him to give us a fearless heart where He can be with us.   We can’t make ourselves different. But He can give us a new heart, a new spirit, a new mind, and a new body. May we let Him transform us by His love and so enable us to receive His affection in our whole being.

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

Today’s devotions is about the road to freedom and the importance of staying on that road. Sometimes we seem to think we are losing ground and going backwards and our healing is sporadic. But when we experience a set back or regress, all is not lost. We don’t start all over again. Instead what we have gained we have gained. 
Sometimes things build up and we feel like we are right back where we started. But instead, it is like we are pulled off the road, and return to the place where we left it, not to where we started.  It is not important to dwell on the moments we feel pulled away from our progress, but we must try to return home, to the solid place within us immediately. Otherwise we connect with similar moments and together they become powerful enough to pull us far away from the road. We must remain alert to the distractions and return to the road when we are on the shoulder rather than when we are pulled all the way into a nearby swamp.  IN everything, let us keep trusting that God is with us and has given us companions on the journey. Let us return to the road of freedom each time we get pulled off.

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

Today’s devotion is on loneliness and the importance of trying to find the source of this feeling. I think Henri dealt with this a lot in his life.  We are all inclined to either run away from our loneliness or to dwell in it. If we run away it doesn’t diminish; we simply force if out of our minds temporarily.  When we start dwelling on it, our feelings only become stronger and we can slip into depression. Our spiritual task is to find the source which is not always easy to do as we can’t do it with our minds. It is a work of the heart and with our heart we can search for that place without fear.  As we discover where these feelings emerge from, it will lose some of its power over us. The pain of our loneliness might be rooted in our deepest vocation or our call to live completely for God.  When we experience in our innermost being the truth of our loneliness, we can find that this loneliness is not just tolerable but may be even fruitful. It can lead us to an even deeper knowledge of God’s love.

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

Today’s devotion is about telling our story and it is important that we look at the pains of our past realizing that it has led us to our new life now. But if the new life is not fully ours, then our memories will continue to cause us pain. For when  we keep reliving painful events of the past, we can feel victimized by them.   But we can instead tell our story from the place where it no longer dominates us and causes us pain.  We can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to our present freedom. We will then find that the pain has left and we don’t have to go back and relive it or depend on our past to identify ourselves.  We don’t need to tell our stories compulsively and urgently to keep returning to our past hurts. But instead they can lose their weight and be remembered as God’s way of making us more compassionate and understanding towards others

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

When we come to live in our bodies as a true expression of who we are, we can be present to others. As our body is an integral part of ourselves, we can trust it and listen to its language. That gives us confidence to be free to claim our unique place in life as God’s gift to us. It will also help us to discern with our whole being the value of other people’s experiences and appreciate them without desiring to imitate them.  We won’t need to compare but walk our own unique way, not in isolation but with the awareness that we don’t have to worry whether others are pleased or not. A new spirituality is being born in us and we can trust that it will find shape within us. We may admire other spiritualities practiced by people we admire but they may not fit our unique call. Their experiences do not have to match our own. But we can trust our own unique vocation and allow it to grow deeper and stronger so it can blossom and bless others.  Look at Rembrandt and Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. They didn’t bend over backwards to please their friends but left humanity with gifts that can heal the minds and hearts of many generations.  Let us trust that we have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully.

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

Today’s devotional is on acknowledging our powerlessness. We all have those places in our lives that we are powerless. We cannot heal ourselves and every time we try we get discouraged. But we have to start simply by admitting that we can’t cure ourselves in order for God to heal us. That means surrendering to God’s action in us and letting go of our desire to control and that takes trust. The more we relinquish our need to maintain power the more we will get in touch with Him who has the power to heal and guide us. As we get in touch with that divine power, it becomes easier to confess to ourselves and others our basic powerlessness. If we run from where much we have received we are though and distract ourselves, we can’t let ourselves be healed.  Let us picture ourselves as a seed that flourishes by staying in the ground in which it is sown. When we dig up the seed to check if it is growing, it will never bear fruit.  Instead we need to stay there and trust that the soil contains everything we need to grow. This growth takes place even when we don’t feel it. Let us be quiet, acknowledge our powerlessness, and have faith that one day we will know how.

Devotions by Henri Nouwen , The Inner Voice of Love

Today’s devotion is on how to live through pain we may have in our lives.  It could be the pain of not receiving what we need most, a place of emptiness where we feel the absence of love, etc. It is hard back to go back to that place where we are confronted with our wounds and our powerlessness to heal ourselves. We must go to that place of our pain, but only after we have gained some new ground.,,that is when  we begin to know that our emptiness is not the final experience but beyond it is a place where we are being held in love.   As  we are able to trust we can go into the place of our pain with the knowledge in our heart that we have already found the new place and tasted of its fruits. The more roots we have in the new place, the more we can mourn the loss of the old place and let go of the pain that lies there.  We can’t mourn the loss of something that has not died. Still, the old pains, attachments and desires that once meant so much to us need to be buried.  We need to weep over our lost pains to that they can gradually leave us and we can become free to fully live in the new place.

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

To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that we only want to be where God is with us. The more deeply we live our spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God.  Our great challenge is faithfulness, which must be lived in the choices we make every moment. When we are find ourselves eating, working, playing, speaking or writing no longer for His glory, then we should stop because we are no longer living for the glory of God. The main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. We have our own inner knowledge to answer that question. When we do something that comes from our need for acceptance, affection and affirmation, and every time we do something that makes these needs grow, we know that we are not with God. These needs won’t be satisfied and will only get bigger. But every time we do something for the glory of God, we will know His peace in our hearts and find rest there. IT is He who holds us safe.