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I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

Barbara Brown Taylor

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
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I’ve relaxed enormously since then. I’m the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Christian Decided Relax
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Self Tradition World
I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Maze Taken Wish
The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There’s a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Eye Loss Self
Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Jobs Meaningful Opportunity
I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Leaving Littles Successful
I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

might People Soul
To be fully human is perhaps why I’m Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Christian Jesus Way
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Bigs People Waiting
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Practice Thinking World
There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Clothes Drop Important Mirrors Spiritual
The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn’t felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Boundaries Responsible Way
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 poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Church Grew Poet

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

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I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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