When you experience a great need for human affection, you have to ask yourself whether the circumstances surrounding you and the people you are with are truly where God wants you to be. Whatever you a...
When we worry, we have our hearts in the wrong place.
When we see ourselves in a relationship of love with God, there is always something of a lover's dilemma, a struggle to give and receive, to trust and obey the call.
When people show you their boundaries (I can't do this for you) you feel rejected...part of your struggle is to set boundaries to your own love. Only when you are able to set your own boundaries will...
Whatever he had lost, be it his money, his friends, his reputation, his self-respect, his inner joy and peace—one or all—he still remained his father’s child. And so he says to himself: How many of my...
What does it mean to care? Let me start by saying that the word care has become a very ambivalent word. When someone says: 'I will take care of him!' it is more likely an announcement of an impending...
What I do know with unwavering certainty is the heart of the father. It is a heart of limitless mercy.
We will encounter great obstacles and splendid views, long dry deserts and shadow-rich trees. We will have to fight against those who try to attack and rob us. We will also make wonderful friends. We...
We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impu...
We are called to witness, always with our lives and sometimes with our words, to the great things God has done for us.
We all are children and parents, students and teachers, healers and in need of care.
Typically we see such hardship as an obstacle to what we think we should be—healthy, good-looking, free of discomfort. We consider suffering as annoying at best, meaningless at worst. We strive to get...
Together, Yet Not Too NearWhen we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness.
To serve means to minister, to love and care for others, and to recognize in them the heart of God. A true disciple of Jesus will always go to where people are feeling weak, broken, sick, in pain, poo...
To love and work for the glory of God cannot remain an idea about which we think once in a while. It must become an interior, unceasing doxology.
To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneli...
To live a spiritual life does not mean that we must leave our families, give up our jobs, or change our ways of working; it does not mean that we have to withdraw from social or political activities,...
To be bored, therefore, does not mean that we have nothing to do, but that we question the value of the things we are so busy doing. The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored...
There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.
There is a real pain in your heart, a pain that truly belongs to you. You know now that you cannot avoid, ignore, or repress it. It is this pain that reveals to you how you are called to live in solid...