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 TAYLORWhoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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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 -
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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 -
Humanity can be pretty stinky.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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.’
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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 -
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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 -
Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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 -
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 -
Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR