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Our waiting is not nothing. It is something — a very big something — because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.

Barbara Brown Taylor

Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Chance InterAction Offers
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Dark Light Needs
Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Hard Recognizing Thinking Times
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Mean People Real
You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you’re into a different kind of relationship.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Community Different People
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Believe Needs Want
I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I’d left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I’d left.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Ministry People Sorry
The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Children Grandmother Love You
I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Jesus Self Two
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Problem Real Reality Resistance
The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Church Grew Poet
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Aunt Circles Godmother
When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Jesus Mean Way
I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Order Self Thinking
The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

People Sunday Tired
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Enough Lucky Prayer

Our waiting is not nothing. It is something — a very big something — because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.

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Our waiting is not nothing. It is something — a very big something — because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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