The Inner Voice of Love

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can, indeed, present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection.

"We are the Beloved. We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us. That’s the truth I want you to claim for yourself. I hear at my center words that say: ‘I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace.. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst.. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover, your spouse.. yes, even your child.. Wherever you are I will be.’

"Everytime you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved, you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply.”

- Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen

“You must believe in the yes that comes back when you ask, ‘Do you love me?’ You must choose this yes even when you do not experience it. .. You have to trust the place that is solid, the place where you can say yes to God’s love even when you do not feel it. .. But keep saying, ‘God loves me, and God’s love is enough.’ You have to choose the solid place over and over again and return to it after every failure.”

- The Inner Voice of Love, Henri Nouwen

I have been thinking about Ellie’s insecurity and desire for love and approval, how in her it runs so close to the surface. I have been thinking about how a deep grasp of God’s love transforms that, and not suppresses, but transforms the experience of emotions and suffering and criticism.

I came across these Nouwen quotes I wrote down years ago: I bought his book The Inner Voice of Love in South Africa, and it remains a favorite, easy to pick up and reread. But it reminded me how shallow and inconsistent my comprehension and experience of God’s love for me can be. I think when I was more alone in the past, when I confronted insecurities more acutely, I thought about this more, but now my life is surrounded by people. I live with my best friend, and I’m swarmed by little people who need love but give so much of it too—all that obscures the fact that my need to rest in God’s love is not any less. No one, not my husband or kids or friends, can give me that love. And I cannot love any of them fully unless I am replete with God’s love. I certainly cannot teach Ellie about God’s deep answers to her insecurities, or show her the way, unless I am walking in it too.