From Restlessness to Solitude: Finding a New Center

We need to learn to face ourselves and come to acknowledge our inner pain and frustrations. More importantly, in the loneliness of who we are we need to recognise our powerlessness to achieve the good and to control our own existence. While we are to act decisively and to be responsible for our own choices, we need to recognise that we are not the masters of our own fate.

These insights need not drive us to despair, but to a new acknowledgement of our creatureliness, and of our need to come into a relationship with God where our strivings are transformed into a new sense of trust.

Henri Nouwen speaks of the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit. Such a movement is not an attempt to escape from ourselves, but the bringing of ourselves to find a new center. Nor is such a movement simply an attempt to escape the pressures of our world. This ia no more than a dream and an illusion. Instead, this movement is the bringing of our whole selves, with all our fears and pain, to find a new center of inner peace.

This can begin to be found when we meet with the God who does not necessarily relieve us of our burdens nor answer all of our concerns, but who embraces us so that our burdens become light on our journey ahead.

Reference: Dare to Journey with Henri Nouwen by Charles Ringma

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