personal development on Abandonment

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater tha...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Autobiographies Have you ever thought about writing your autobiography? It would be a little like reliving your life, at least in miniscule. As a write...

A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

One of the early hits of the internet had to be eBay. Suddenly getting rid of your old junk, or otherwise unnecessary “stuff,” could be sold, not just to your neighbors in a yard sale, but to anyone w...

This story is probably apocryphal, but conveys a truth nonetheless. During the early 19th century, following the Napoleonic Wars, a French soldier was captured and imprisoned. He was thrown into a...

Have you really forsaken us? Why are you so far away from where we need you? Why do you not pay attention to what seems to us So alarming? Why are you so otherworldly? Day and night we have cried...

For many of us, life can easily become disorienting and discouraging. Existential questions often emerge that never have before. As stressful as modern life can be, it is somewhat comforting to know t...

At root, change means the partial or total abandonment of the norms, safeties, and patterns of behavior that make our lives manageable.

Is God really “in” all things? And would it matter if the answer was “yes” or “no”? How? Jean-Pierre de Caussade was an 18th century French Jesuit preacher, theologian, and spiritual director who t...

Father, we thank you that you are a God who provides second chances. You called us to go and we ran. We ran as far from your presence as possible. You pursued us in our abandonment of your call. Like ...

We thank you, God our Father, that by your grace, mercy and love, expressed today in Word and Sacrament, You give us Your Son, the true bread from heaven and the fountain of living water. Strengthen u...

In 1998, Nick Cave*, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of t...

Tolerating absence is, in essence, trusting presence—even when the one who is present to us is not physically present. Think of the two-year-old gradually loosening his clinging grasp to the leg of hi...

When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.

Surrender your poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers y...

Failure isn’t final until you quit!

The other thing that helps me deal with my compulsion to control things through my direct involvement and my fear of missing out is what Henri Nouwen has called “the ministry of absence.” Jesus modele...

The skills have been lost of being present for and in another, and what remains is mistrust and violence.

In his book The Logic of the Spirit, James Loder talks about a woman with whom he had been in a therapeutic relationship for years. This woman’s underlying issue seemed to be a complete sense of rejec...

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

Quite often the absence of immediate success is the mark of a genuine call.

As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

Remember this. When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold. When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in...

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. Af...

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you're serving in the wrong place.

A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal.

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...