How We Learn to Be Brave Quotes

“I am convinced that we all have the capacity to live within a narrative of great adventure, no matter our life circumstances. The courage to be brave when it matters most requires a lifetime of small decisions that set us on a path of self-awareness, attentiveness, and willingness to risk failure for what we believe is right. It is also a profoundly spiritual experience, one in which we feel a part of something larger than ourselves and guided, somehow, by a larger Spirit at work in the world and in us. Decisive moments make believers out of everyone, for no matter what name we give to it, the inexplicable, unmerited experience of a power greater than our own working through us is real. The audacious truth is that we matter in the realization of all that is good and noble and true. I want to expand our notion of what constitutes a decisive moment, for they come in many forms and require a wide range of decisions, equally decisive yet different in their energy and outcome.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“I want to be among the coalition of the faithful. I want to be among those working for the change we need now.” That’s the decision with which I need to align my life every day.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“first question the Levite and the priest asked when they saw the wounded man was ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ The Good Samaritan reversed the question. ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’ . . . That is the question before you tonight.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“My prayer is that, by grace, we all will be emboldened to lean into the wisdom, strength, power, and grace that come to us, whenever we find ourselves at a decisive moment. May you and I dare to believe that we are where we are meant to be when that moment comes, doing the work that is ours to do, fully present to our lives. For it is in this work that we learn to be brave.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Jesus didn’t just “come to die.” Jesus came to live—to teach, to heal, to tell stories, to turn over tables, to touch people who weren’t supposed to be touched and eat with people who weren’t supposed to be eaten with. To break bread, to pour wine, to wash feet, to face temptation, to tick off the authorities, to fulfill Scripture, to announce the start of a brand-new kingdom, to show us what that kingdom is like, to show us what God is like, to love his enemies to the point of death at their hand, and to beat death by rising from the grave.[26]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“his book, Curry cites multiple examples of people who chose love as their response to seemingly hopeless situations—from the church elders who cared for him after his mother died when he was twelve to public figures like civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, who fought for justice all their lives. But before they could respond in love, each had to face and accept their pain, not as an expression of God’s will, but as the arena in which they were called to embody God’s love for someone else. “Love is not always easy,” Curry writes, “but like with muscles we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works.”[45]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to me?’ But ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.”[43] King’s question is at the heart of sacrificial love and acceptance. Compassion for another places us in service to something beyond ourselves and helps us become larger inside than the suffering we must endure or choose to endure.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Love is not always easy,” Curry writes, “but like with muscles we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works.”[45]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“If you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. . . . It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.[”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“This is your life, he says softly. Lean into it. View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. This is the only life you'll have.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“When we decide to start toward something that requires courage, we are often creating new possibilities for those who come after us. Our example may be the one to inspire others to turn toward their Jerusalem, whatever the path God has set before them.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Let me be clear: the president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches in my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence. We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us.” [5]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“It takes courage to accept and fully live the lives we have been given.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“I am convinced that we all have the capacity to live within a narrative of great adventure”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“If this ship is going down, I’m going down with it—but not without doing everything I can to keep that from happening.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“This was not a revival of religion in the conventional sense...but rather the discovery that faith was not what you believed but what you did for others when it seemed you could do nothing at all.' Faith returned to them as the result of their compassion and, as they leaned into faith that God was with them in suffering, their capacity for compassion grew.”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“anything worth doing. Still, it matters that we show up to do our part. “This is a moment that calls for many leaders,” Johnson said, “because what we need is transformation in every community, in every sector of the economy, in every ecosystem, with the hundreds of solutions we have. . . . It’s all about how we build a future that we want to live in, where there’s a place for us and the people and the things that we love.”[3]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Johnson’s rejection of a simplistic hope based on wishful thinking is, in fact, very close to the Christian understanding of what hope is—the capacity to face reality, no matter how difficult, and still seek whatever good is possible. As a person of faith, I dare to trust that God is at work amid the most challenging realities of our lives, and that by grace and acceptance, we join God in the holy work of transforming the world. Although I know that God cannot spare us from the consequences of our actions, I hold on to the promise that God will be with us always, to the end of the age. Moreover, I believe that God summons us to work together, as Bishop Barber said, in coalitions of the faithful, for the promise of a better day. Alone, we cannot accomplish”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Rachel Held Evans argued against the tendency in Christian theology to focus on Jesus”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“legislature during Reconstruction. He pleaded with his white colleagues not to disenfranchise Black citizens, to no avail. Racial discrimination was codified in the new state constitution, as it was throughout the South. Where legal measures failed, they gave way to more violent means to maintain white rule.[11] Beyond making the obvious case for interpreting the election of Donald Trump through the lens of backlash to the Obama years, Coates traces the legacy of white supremacy from the Civil War forward and our proclivity as a nation to, at shining moments, “reach for the best part of itself, only to quickly retrench to the worst part of itself.”[12]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay compilation We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is a particularly compelling study of white backlash in which he draws haunting parallels between Barack Obama’s two-term presidency and the post–Civil War Reconstruction Era—both historical moments of exemplary Black leadership that prompted ferocious opposition among the white populace. The title refers to a speech that South Carolina Congressman Thomas Miller gave in 1885 in which he described all the good that had been done during the eight years that Black politicians controlled the”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Stepping up to the plate is a choice, but there is a dimension to it that feels more like intuition or instinct—we act without relying on conscious thought or even emotion. Sometimes when the moment comes, we instantly know that we have the”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“Beneath the sweltering sun of southern cotton fields, they shouldered on with the hope that the omnipotent God could “make a way out of no way”—that because of Christ, God would somehow bring good from the evils inflicted on them. . . . This hope in God’s redemptive purposes in suffering has sustained black Christians through the historic brutalities like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the lynching tree, and segregation.[27]”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith

“When my ankle finally began to improve, the pain migrated to my lower back. Although I could now walk, sitting for any length of time was agony, as was lying down. Months went by with no relief, then a year, and then another. I learned how exhausting chronic pain can be, and how hard it is to talk about. Everyone wanted me to feel better, and I felt like I was letting them down. My physical therapist mother kept saying, “Your back shouldn’t hurt,” as if that settled the matter. I could”
― Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith