PREPARING FOR THE LENTEN SEASON 2021

Living Well Through Lent 2021 

Listening With All Your Heart, Soul, Strength, and Mind

Quotes, Scripture & Prayers for Use During Lent

By being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourselves engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanation.

 — Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns

A listening heart is always open, sensitive to the joy and pain of others, offering a space within itself for the other to enter. It gives each person what is so badly needed—an affirmation of their place in this world.

—Eliezer Shore

No one listens, they tell me, and so I listen …  and I tell them what they have just told me,  and I sit in silence listening to them,  letting them grieve. 

—Julian of Norwich

Listen, attune, and heed the inner Voice of Love. For in sacred Silence, we open ourselves  to Wisdom, to ever deepening communion with the Source of all creation.

 —Nan Merrill

 

Listening is where love begins. —Mister Rogers

 

Listen, listen Wait in silence listening For the one from whom all mercy flows.                                     —Contemplative chant

Everyone is God speaking. Why not be polite and listen to Him?  

 —Hafiz

 

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure. 

—Henri Nouwen

 

The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves. 

—Henri Nouwen

 

All wisdom was the result of listening to one’s own soul.

—Paulo Coelho

 

The first duty of love is to listen. —Paul Tillich

 

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. 

—Doug Larson

 

It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.

—Criss Jami 

 

Good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process—we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us. 

—Margaret J. Wheatley

 

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

—Parker Palmer

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.  

—Parker Palmer

 

In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.

—Howard Thurman

 

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.                      

   —Isaiah 49:1

 

The Master, God, has given me a well-taught tongue, So I know how to encourage tired people. He wakes me up in the morning, Wakes me up, opens my ears to listen as one ready to take orders. The Master, God, opened my ears, and I didn’t go back to sleep, didn’t pull the covers back over my head.                          

 —Isaiah 50:4

 

For God alone my soul waits in silence. —Psalm 62:1

 

O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice!

 —Psalm 95:6-7

 

Help, God—the bottom has fallen out of my life! Master, hear my cry for help! Listen hard! Open your ears! Listen to my cries for mercy.

 —Psalm 130:1-2, The Message

 

YOU are invited to join me every day of the Lenten Season 2021 for a morning devotional thought beginning at 6:00am each morning.  I pray God will speak to you during this time in 2021.   

 

Living Well Through Lent 2021

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