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Simplifying life with God down to its essence

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Simplicity is about setting aside extraneous concerns and reducing things down to their essence. What if you could ask a great spiritual master to reduce things down to their essence? Let's hear how one such person would answer that question. There's nothing like a crisis in life to give you an urgent need to simplify things. Henri Nouwen was known as one of the great Christian spiritual masters of the twentieth century. At one point, he went through a period of intense personal and relational upheaval. During that period, he had to reduce his life with God down to its essence. It was a matter of inner survival.  If we could have sat down with him on an early spring day in 1988 and asked him to simplify the Christian life for us, he would have had a clear answer, born of his own crisis. Here he is talking to himself in his personal journal from that time... Your main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. You have your own inner kn