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Quotes About God

Remember, you are held safe. You are loved. You are protected. You are in communion with God and with those whom God has sent you. What is of God will last. It belongs to the eternal life. Choose it, and it will be yours.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God's Spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing, with us.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
The question that must guide all organizing activity in a parish is not how to keep people busy, but how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Our clinging to the opinions of others reveals how superficial we are. We have little to stand on. We have to be kept alive by adulation and praise. Those who are deeply rooted in the love of God can enjoy human praise without being attached to it.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
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
Your true identity is as a child of God. This is the identity you have to accept. Once you have claimed it and settled in it, you can live in a world that gives you much joy as well as pain. You can receive the praise as well as the blame that comes to you as an opportunity for strengthening your basic identity, because the identity that makes you free is anchored beyond all human praise and blame. You belong to God, and it is as a child of God that you are sent into the world.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
You have to acknowledge where you are and affirm that place. You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack of total incarnation fearlessly, and trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
For me, God is the one who calls me the Beloved, and I have a desire to express to others how I try to become more fully who I already am.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
I can only be healed from above, from where God reaches down. What is impossible for me is possible for God. "With God, everything is possible.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
But our task is the opposite of distraction. Our task is to help people concentrate on the real but often hidden event of God's active presence in their lives. Hence, the question that must guide all organizing activity in a parish is not how to keep people busy, but how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
The paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God; but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
God wants to bring joy not pain, peace not war, healing not suffering. Therefore, instead of declaring anything and everything to be the will of God, we must be willing to ask ourselves where in the midst of our pains and sufferings we can discern the loving presence of God.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
People we meet, some great in the eyes of the world and some almost invisible to the larger society, are often conduits of God's wisdom.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
I am beginning now to see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but, instead, as the one who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
The loud, boisterous noises of the world make us deaf to the soft, gentle, and loving voice of God.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
now I realize that the real sin is to deny God's first love for me, to ignore my original goodness. Because without claiming that first love and that original goodness for myself, I lose touch with my true self and embark on the destructive search among the wrong people and in the wrong places for what can only be found in the house of my Father.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
humility is in reality the opposite of self-deprecation. It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God's eyes and that all we are is pure gift.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
God should be sought, but we cannot find God. We can only be found by him.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
With a friend we don't have to say or do something special. With a friend we can be still and know that God is there with both of us.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
The real mystery of marriage is not that husband and wife love each other so much that they can recognize God in each other's lives, but more because God loves them so much that they can discover each other more and more as living reminder's of God's presence.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
Let's dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love.
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen