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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

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
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
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
I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Holy Ignorance Religious
The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Effort Heart Sky
I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Jobs Praying Quiet
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

Feet Looks Want
The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Church Grew Poet
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
Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Everyday Reality Sky
Whoever 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.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Holiness Waiting World
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

Becoming Faithful might
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
To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Feel Powerful Side 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 value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR

Christian Memories Real

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.

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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.

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