Quotes about Growth
At every stage of development our life may be perfect; yet if God's purpose for us is fulfilled, there will be continual advancement. Sanctification is the work of a lifetime. As our opportunities multiply, our experience will enlarge, and our knowledge increase. We shall become strong to bear responsibility, and our maturity will be in proportion to our privileges.
— Ellen White
After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side." … I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Instead, 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.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
How do we develop the courage to walk in the dark if we are never asked to practice?
— Barbara Brown Taylor
I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Reason can only work with the experience available to it. Wisdom atrophies if it is not walked on a regular basis.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction," wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?
— Barbara Brown Taylor