Quotes about Reflection

Thats because, like everyone else on the planet, you believed that time would teach you to grow closer to God. But time doesnt teach; it merely brings us a sense of weariness and of growing older.

Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?

We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

Be thankful when you made the right choices and admit it when you didn't.

Pruning includes purging the wrong thinking, the negative attitudes, and the wrong people that surround you.

The best way to start praying, therefore, is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still. To put down your prayer list and surrender your own personal agenda. To stop talking at God long enough to focus on the wonder of who he actually is. To 'be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him'.

Archbishop Justin Welby says, the Lord's Prayer is 'simple enough to be memorised by small children, and yet profound enough to sustain a whole lifetime of prayer'.

I am convinced, however, that our constant activity is fruitless without first making that humble act of kneeling to pray. I am convinced that prayer is not only our greatest privilege, but also our greatest source of power.

A prayer room is a place where we can experience peace so that we can make peace later. A place where we can accept forgiveness so that we can live our lives as priests at work. A place where we receive our Father's acceptance so that we can love even those who laugh at us later in the day.

The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room as Jesus's hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually: to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with his ears with every waking moment.

Here's the question: Will we allow the things that break God's heart to break our hearts too? It'll mean more tears, more listening. It may even be the reason why so many of us struggle with our own personal burdens and heartaches - God is allowing us to feel the pain, to be weak and broken so that our prayers have power.

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.