Emphasis Preaching Journal

I listened to the widely-known Henri Nouwen as the speaker in a major conference at Kanuga this past spring, and I discovered a new appreciation of looking backward. Look back in one's life -- that's what Nouwen implied repeatedly, and some of us took it seriously and did it. What Henri Nouwen saw, as he looked back in his own life, is that God really was there all the time. In Nouwen's times of discouragement, it was relatively easy, he said, to believe that God was yet standing by. But in the hours of great despair, it was not so easy.