Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “When I was seven, my family moved to a new town, and the Methodist pastor came to call. Before my parents could trap him in the living room I took him on a tour of the yard, where he admired the nursery I had set up to save helpless tadpoles from murderous neighbor boys. The following Sunday I sat in a church for the first time, smiling at the pastor who smiled back at me. I was already in love, but when he stood up to speak – likening God’s care for the world to a little girl’s care for a mess of tadpoles – something inside of me shifted for good. This God, it seemed, had something to do not only with the world I lived in but also with me and my place in it. Furthermore, the people in that church knew something about the connection that I did not, or at least they had words for it that I did not: glory, majesty, holy, Lord.
“It took me many more years to make the connection for myself, but when I finally settled in a church it was (surprise!) a sacramental one, where I learned to recognize God’s presence in the most ordinary things.” (from The Living Pulpit, July-September 2003)
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