Beloved

The change of which I speak is the change from living life as a painful test to prove that you deserve to be loved, to living it as an unceasing “Yes” to the truth of that Belovedness. Put simply, life is a God-given opportunity to become who we are, to affirm our own true spiritual nature, claim our truth, appropriate and integrate the reality of our being, but, most of all, to say “Yes” to the One who calls us Beloved. The unfathomable mystery of God is that God is a Lover who wants to be loved. The one who created us is waiting for our response to the love that gives us our being. God not only says: “You are my Beloved.” God also asks: “Do you love me?” and offers countless chances to say “Yes.” That is the spiritual life: the chance to say “Yes” to inner truth. The spiritual life, thus understood, radically changes everything. Being born and growing up, leaving home and finding a career, being praised and being rejected, walking and resting, praying and playing, becoming ill and being healed—yes, living and dying—they all become expressions of the divine question: “Do you love me?” And at every point of the journey there is the choice to say “Yes” and the choice to say “No.”

-Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved