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Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world.

Frederick Buechner

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Frederick Buechner
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: July 11
Autobiographer
Novelist
Poet
Theologian
Writer
New York City
New York
Carl Frederick Buechner
Intersects
Calling
Joy
Greatest
Needs
World

More quotes by Frederick Buechner

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Each one of us could describe his or her life as a sacred journey. You are journeying from the beginning to the end, and what makes it sacred is that in the process of this journey you encounter the holy in various forms which, unless you have your eyes open, you might not even notice.
Frederick Buechner
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There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.
Frederick Buechner
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We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Frederick Buechner
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The world needs people who save lives.
Frederick Buechner
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That's five friends, one each for Jesu's wounds, and Godric bears their mark still on what's left of him as in their time they all bore his on them. What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?
Frederick Buechner
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You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.
Frederick Buechner
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He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.
Frederick Buechner
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Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Frederick Buechner
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To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, I believe in my friend.
Frederick Buechner
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Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks...It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.
Frederick Buechner
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Not to love is, psychically, spiritually, to die. To live for yourself alone, hoarding your life for your own sake, is in almost every sense that matters to reduce your life to a life hardly worth the living, and thus to lose it.
Frederick Buechner
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Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.
Frederick Buechner
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Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner
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The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.
Frederick Buechner
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Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.
Frederick Buechner
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I don't know that it makes any difference whether it's at this time or a hundred years before or a hundred years later. I think always it's a matter of simply listen[ing] to what is going on around you and in your own experience. Try to understand what's happening, or if not to understand it, at least to appreciate the reality of it.
Frederick Buechner
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The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done....the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet
Frederick Buechner
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To believe is not intellectual assent: Yes, I believe in Jesus. I will sign my name to the Nicene Creed. I believe it all - which you could do, [but] it would have no effect on who you were or what you did. It is, rather, to give your heart.
Frederick Buechner
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If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.
Frederick Buechner
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The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.
Frederick Buechner