The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLORThe great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
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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Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.
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Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
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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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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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I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
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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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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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Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
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To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
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I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
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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.
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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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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 church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR