Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
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The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
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I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
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There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.
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I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
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Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.
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That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.
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We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
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I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real.
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I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
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When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
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If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.
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You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
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To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
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Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
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The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
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You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
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I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
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The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
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Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
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I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
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I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.
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Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.