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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORWhen I talk about losing myself, which I did, it’s losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.
More Barbara Brown Taylor Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR -
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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Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
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With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
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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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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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Humanity can be pretty stinky.
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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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It’s difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
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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






