16 quotes
In depression, the built-in bunk detector that we all possess is not only turned on but is set on high.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
Reality—including one’s own—is divine, not to be defied but honored.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
One of the hardest things we must sometimes do is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
I waste energy on anger rather than investing it in hope.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy.
If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract the price from others.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
There is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as in way that opens up ahead of us. The opening may reveal our potentials while the closing may reveal our limits—two sides to the same coin, the coin called identity.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I an exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular “good.”
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
The irony, often tragic, is that by embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear. … We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others for resources.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts about a subject without being overly influenced by what others have thought before me.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
… honoring one’s created nature
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)
When I understand this liability as a trade-off for my strengths, something new and liberating arises within me. I no longer want to have my liability “fixed”—by learning how to dance solo, for example, when no one wants to dance with me—for to do that would be to compromise or even destroy my gift.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)