I am reading a book called The Good and Beautiful God and in it the author quotes Nouwen who seems hint at a blog post that has been in the works for a week or so. The blog post will come out in the next couple of weeks and it will be entitled “Our Attempts to be “Somebody””. Nouwen writes,
The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus?… In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God; a heart that forgives, cares, reaches out and wants to heal
Nouwen nudges us in the direction of our identity and calls us to reconsider where we attain identity and how that in turn affects how we interact with the world. We have a deep fear that we are a nobody if no one takes us seriously because we think that must mean that we are not valued by them in a way that we think we desperately need for life and vitality. In reality no one will value us or love us the way we need to be, hence why Nouwen writes that our world is full of loneliness and despair. Nouwen leads us to the waters of identity and to consider what it might mean to have our identity in Christ, which enables us to give ourselves in ways that aren’t possible if we are constantly begging people for something that they are not capable of giving us. That’s a brief taste of what has been marinating in my heart and mind. I look forward to finishing this blog post in full soon!
Poiema 