Quotes about Growth
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
if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got. Extreme measures are sometimes called for, and these measures sometimes even produce results.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more, even the parts that expose our scornfulness, we need partners from outside our ingroups to keep telling us how we sound.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Greenspan calls this "spiritual bypassing"—using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.
— Barbara Brown Taylor