Jean Vanier Quotes

I believe that people need to get their worth and value from knowing that God loves them. I believe that all healing in our inner man and even, we know Christ also heals people's physical diseases, but the Bible says he heals our wounds and bruises. Don't worry about what's wrong with you right now, God accepts you just the way you are and he will help you be what he wants you to be.

Spiritual identity means we are not what we do or what people say about us. And we are not what we have. We are the beloved daughters and sons of God.

Regardless of the source of our pain, we must accept that God knows, God loves, and God is at work.

We need prayer to understand God's love for us. If we really mean to pray and want to pray we must be ready to do it now. These are only the first steps towards prayer but if we never make the first step with determination, we will not reach the last one: the presence of God

When things hurt us, we're merely on our way to another spiritual environment.

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.

In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.

Do not despair, dear heart, but come to the Lord with all your jagged wounds, black bruises, and running sores. He alone can heal, and He delights to do it. It is our Lord's office to bind up the brokenhearted, and He is gloriously at home at it.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control, It begins with your family, and soon it comes round to your soul. Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned: When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned.

God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiety happens to be my own particular demon, a floating sense of doom that has ruined many of what could have been, should have been, the happiest days of my life, and more than a few times in my life I have been raised from such ruins, which is another way of saying that more than a few times in my life I have been raised from death - death of the spirit anyway, death of the heart - by the healing power that Jesus calls us both to heal with and to be healed by.

Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.

The way of the Cross is not easy, yet it is the tuneful, the rhythmic, the beautiful, the lovely way.

In the face of so many wounds that hurt us and could lead to a hardness of heart, we are called to dive into the sea of prayer, which is the sea of the boundless love of God, in order to experience his tenderness

To commune daily with God in deep meditation, and to carry His love and guidance with you into all your dutiful activities, is the way that leads to permanent peace and happiness.

Never waste time and energy wishing you were somewhere else, doing something else. Accept your situation and realize you are where you are, doing what you are doing, for a very specific reason. Realize that nothing is by chance, that you have certain lessons to learn and that the situation you are in has been given to you to enable you to learn those lessons as quickly as possible, so that you can move onward and upward along this spiritual path.

Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished.

Our life is a reflection of what we believe we deserve. As we deepen our acceptance of and open ourselves to the Infinite love of the universe, a new power flows through us, releasing us from the bondage of our old way of life.

Set me free from evil passions, and heal my heart of all inordinate affections; that being inwardly cured and thoroughly cleansed, I may be made fit to love, courageous to suffer, steady to persevere.

Love is the first step towards the divine, surrender is the last. And two steps is the whole journey.

God loves me enough to let me go through all the lessons I came here to learn, even the ones that hurt the most. His presence doesn't deny me. It's always there to help me see and understand what I came to this planet to learn.

The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.

Every human being is loved by God the Father. No one need feel forgotten, for every name is written in the Lord's loving heart.

I find myself frequently depressed - perhaps more so than any other person here. And I find no better cure for that depression than to trust in the Lord with all my heart, and seek to realize afresh the power of the peace-speaking blood of Jesus, and His infinite love in dying upon the cross to put away all my transgressions.

Eventually I lost interest in trying to control my life, to make things happen in a way that I thought I wanted them to be. I began to practice surrendering to the universe and finding out what "it" wanted me to do.