Quotes from Daniel Taylor

Pull a thread in my story and feel the tremor half a world and two millenia away.

If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven't, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.

Nothing should be of higher value to the reflective Christian in difficult circumstances than an unqualified desire to see truth triumph. One should wish passionately that it prevail, should love it more than one's own prestige or sense of security.

With anything that would make things better, believe as much as you can—then believe a little more.

It is simultaneously the blessing and the curse of the reflective Christian that believers are called to live out their faith in the church. No institution has accomplished so much for good in the world; none has fallen so short of its calling! The church is God-ordained, God-inspired, but accomplishes its work through human beings subject to every possible failing.

Your legacy is the fragrance of your life that remains when you yourself are not present.

Salvation is to accept one's place in the story of faith whose theme is shalom.

Stories make it possible for us to be human.

Where there is doubt, faith has its reason for being. Clearly faith is not needed where certainty supposedly exists, but only in situations where doubt is possible, even present.

There's something about death that gets our attention. When it's close—in the family or shared by the community—it sends us back to our most basic understanding of things. Back to our presuppositions you might say. Death requires of us an explanation. Some invoke the periodic table, some the human condition, and some go back to church—at least for a while.

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the idea of God, not in God Himself. MIGUEL D

You are your stories. You are the product of all the stories you have heard and lived—and of many that you have never heard. They have shaped how you see yourself, the world, and your place in it.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. ALBERT EINSTEIN

So we're going to church. But which church? Americans like choice in their churches, as in their snack foods. We favor designer churches and a God designed to fit our tastes. We even start sentences with "My God is" followed by a descriptor, as though we each get to create the kind of god we want from a checklist of qualities that please us: loving (check), reasonable (check), favors my causes (double check).

Pain was a part of so many good things - giving birth, writing a poem, asking forgiveness, even saying I love you. Complete freedom from pain meant separation from life.

We are all wedded to our stories. It doesn't mean we are each hermetically sealed in our own little worlds, impervious to the influence of others. It does mean the only way to avoid such isolation is to listen, compassionately, to the stories of others.

In the narrow application of logic to limited problems some degree of objectivity is perhaps possible. But in the broil of the wider human experience, in deciding what is good and true and beautiful and worth living for in this world, there is so much sheer humanness at work (and there should be, that the claim of cool, rational objectivity is almost laughable.

It reinforced my sense of living in a coherent universe, of belonging to something important that stretched over time, of being a link in a chain - indebted to many in the past, mostly unknown to me, and responsible to many in the future, who likewise will not know who I was.

We do not choose between a life of difficulty and a life of ease. We simply choose for what purpose we will work, sometimes suffer, and hopefully endure.