Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORWe’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.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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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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You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.
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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.
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It’s difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
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I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
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I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey.
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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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I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
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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.
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Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
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The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
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When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.
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When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, ‘Here, I guess, since this is where I am.’
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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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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.
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Humanity can be pretty stinky.
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I’ve got a hold of something that won’t move. It’s a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
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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
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I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
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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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For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.
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As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
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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.
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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
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I didn’t want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR