Top 80 Kate Bowler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I’m everyone’s inspiration and no one’s friend.”

— Kate Bowler

52. “It is a mystery to me why some mere minutes transform into moments, hovering outside of time. And how they ebb and flow, stirring wonder and the ache for more. I know the love of a God who is beyond all wanting, but the more I live, the more I want and want and want.”

— Kate Bowler

53. “We are reminded why the title pastor comes from the word shepherd, because most of Christian ministry will be spent attending to everyday life. My students at the divinity school sign up for the grand cause of joining God in bringing heaven to earth but mostly find themselves fiddling with the sanctuary sound system and trying to get what’s-her-face off the church council.”

— Kate Bowler

54. “Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can master the future with our words and attitudes.”

— Kate Bowler

55. “I have known Christ in so many good times,” she said, sincerely and directly. “And now I will know Him better in His sufferings.”

— Kate Bowler

56. “I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead.”

— Kate Bowler

57. “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she has argued. “Nothing. A lot of grace, a lot of blessings, a lot of divine order, but I don’t believe in luck. For me, luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”

— Kate Bowler

58. “There is a time to speak and a time to shut your piehole.”

— Kate Bowler

59. “I have been all kinds of cheery, but positivity has become a burden. And it’s a burden I assumed when I decided that in the darkness of Advent I would save myself.”

— Kate Bowler

60. “They would find something simple and that would be the end of it. I’d just have to schedule my life around a surgery, nothing major.”

— Kate Bowler

61. “But the truth is somewhere inside of me: there is no formula. We live and we are loved and we are gone.”

— Kate Bowler

62. “It is not proof of anything. And it is nothing to boast about. It was simply a gift. I can’t reply to the thousands of emails with my own Five-Step Plan to Divine Health or series of powerful formulas, which guarantee results. I suppose I am like the man who wrote to me to say he had seen a friend swinging from a tree and felt the presence of God in the same long, dark night. Yes. That is the God I believe in.”

— Kate Bowler

63. “But mostly I see people who refuse to allow their loved ones to grow weary.”

— Kate Bowler

64. “Based on the information we have about people with Stage Four colon cancer, the survival rate is fourteen percent,” he said and began to scan the room as if looking for a window to climb out of.”

— Kate Bowler

65. “I am, unfortunately, amazing at being miserable.”

— Kate Bowler

66. “People say carpe diem. I mean, yes, unless you need a nap.”

— Kate Bowler

67. “Do people age into acceptance? Is this personality or maturity or a natural realism? Had he already accomplished what he wanted to do? Did he see his kids get married, reach an anniversary, or hit a milestone? What amounted to enough?”

— Kate Bowler

68. “It felt like something had pushed the reset button and my life had only begun. I should have asked for a birth certificate for myself.”

— Kate Bowler

69. “It was certainty, plain and simple that God had a worthy plan for my life in which every set back would also be a step forward.”

— Kate Bowler

70. “We are grass, murmur the scriptures. Our crowns are just flowers. We are here and then gone in a burst of wind.”

— Kate Bowler

71. “Money for treatment. My parents and siblings are taking out loans against their homes now and setting retirement ideas aside to help cover what insurance denies.”

— Kate Bowler

72. “I plead with a God of Maybe, who may or may not let me collect more years. It is a God I love, and a God that breaks my heart.”

— Kate Bowler

73. “In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin – a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined attitudes, or careless words. A suffering believer is a puzzle to be solved.”

— Kate Bowler

74. “I was surrounded by the world’s luckiest people in a culture that doesn’t believe in luck.”

— Kate Bowler

75. “I think I’m running out of time... ,” I say finally. “I’m not trying to be dramatic, but here’s what I worry about: What if you are too?” She knows what I am saying... her selflessness has caused her to surrender too much of herself to “someday.” And now someday has come, at least for me.”

— Kate Bowler

76. “It is a strange fact that sometimes the people who love you most will be among the first to stop worrying about you. An inflexible optimism stands as a barrier between you. You will be fine. Anything to the contrary seems too difficult to communicate.”

— Kate Bowler

77. “What followed was a blissful year. That is the most annoying thing in the world to say, in a world full of mothers who struggle with breast-feeding, high fevers, long days, and late nights. But I can only try to redeem myself by saying that I was completely caught off guard by my outrageous happiness.”

— Kate Bowler

78. “It never occurred to me that every life must be constantly reinvented by adventures and private jokes, and that it might, suddenly, end.”

— Kate Bowler

79. “No matter the temperature, I insist that all impossible decisions must be made outside under the uninterrupted sky. How else could you know you’re still alive?”

— Kate Bowler

80. “Sorry,” I continue, “I’m not trying to be a jerk. But everyone seems to be proceeding under the assumption that their luck is guaranteed once they hit... I don’t know middle class? No one seems to understand that everyone’s life hangs by a thread.”

— Kate Bowler

81. “Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can muster the future with our words and attitudes. I can barely admit to myself that I have almost no choice but to surrender, but neither can those around me. I can hear it in my sister-in-law’s voice as she tells me to keep fighting. I can see it in my academic friends, who do what researchers do... Buried in all their concern is the unspoken question: Do I have any control?”

— Kate Bowler

82. “Why? God, are you here? What does this suffering mean?”

— Kate Bowler

83. “Yes! Thank you. I need you to know that these books are not suitable to be sold in a hospital. ” I point to a pile of Christian bestsellers I’ve made on the floor, books that I had carefully studied and documented in a comprehensive history of the movement known as the prosperity gospel.”

— Kate Bowler

84. “When life gives you a monthly subscription to miserable news, it’s really hard to take other people’s problems seriously.”

— Kate Bowler

85. “It is a strange fact that sometimes the people who love you most will be among the first to stop worrying about you.”

— Kate Bowler

86. “When I teach pastors at the seminary where I work, I lecture them about the First Great Awakening and religious responses to the Civil War and how their political differences will ruin their next Thanksgiving if they don’t learn to shut their traps.”

— Kate Bowler