Henri Nouwen Society - Daily Meditation
Saturday August 30, 2014

Choosing Life

God says, "I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse.  Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live"   (Deuteronomy 30:19).

"Choose life."  That's God's call for us, and there is not a moment in which we do not have to make that choice.  Life and death are always before us.  In our imaginations, our thoughts, our words, our gestures, our actions ... even in our nonactions.  This choice for life starts in a deep interior place.  Underneath very life-affirming behaviour I can still harbour death-thoughts and death-feelings.  The most important question is not "Do I kill?" but "Do I carry a blessing in my heart or a curse?"   The bullet that kills is only the final instrument of the hatred that began being nurtured in the heart long before the gun was picked up.

- Henri J. M. Nouwen  
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Text excerpts taken from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, �1997 HarperSanFrancisco. All Scripture from The Jerusalem Bible �1966, 1967, and 1968 Darton, Longman & Todd and Doubleday & Co. Inc. Photo by V. Dobson.