Top 100 Sarah Bessey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Stop waiting for someone else to say that you count, that you matter, that you have worth, that you have a voice, a place, that you are called. Don’t you know, darling? The One who knit you together in your mother’s womb is the one singing these words over you, you are chosen.”

— Sarah Bessey

2. “If our theology doesn’t shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we’re paying attention.”

— Sarah Bessey

3. “At the core, feminism simply consists of the radical notion that women are people, too.”

— Sarah Bessey

4. “My friend KellyIII told me to pay attention to the difference between self-care and self-comfort. I had a natural bent toward indulging in self-comfort; what I needed now in this season of my life was radical self-care. Self-comfort numbs us, weakens us, hides us; it can be a soporific. But self-care awakens us, strengthens us, and emboldens us to rise.”

— Sarah Bessey

5. “I won’t desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won’t confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath.”

— Sarah Bessey

6. “Anyone who gets to the end of their life with the exact same beliefs and opinions as they had at the beginning is doing it wrong.”

— Sarah Bessey

7. “Let me remember how the most fearless thing we can do is keep showing up with love and grace and joy in our real, right-now lives.”

— Sarah Bessey

8. “We need courageous women who are rising with full awareness of who came before us, who is alongside of us, who is missing from among us, and who is coming up behind us.”

— Sarah Bessey

9. “I want to be outside with the misfits, with the rebels, the dreamers, second-chance givers, the radical grace lavishers, the ones with arms wide open, the courageously vulnerable, and among even – or maybe especially – the ones rejected by the Table as not worthy enough or right enough.”

— Sarah Bessey

10. “One of the great lies women tend to embrace is this one: We are only as valuable as how we look or what we do or what we produce.”

— Sarah Bessey

11. “One soul is as important as ninety-nine, worth leaving everything behind to rescue. If there is one soul in your care, one face in your loving gaze, one hand in yours, then you are loving the world.”

— Sarah Bessey

12. “May we be... the ones who hold our opinions loosely and yet love ferociously.”

— Sarah Bessey

13. “I pray that you would experience the weirdness of the divine love in ways that leave you disoriented. I pray that you would be caught off guard when God meets you outside of the boxes you have constructed and yet remains in the places you vacated. I pray you will bless the box you once needed for God and that you will treat it tenderly even as you leave it behind you.”

— Sarah Bessey

14. “American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards aptly said, “The task of every generation is to discover in which direction the Sovereign Redeemer is moving, then move in that direction.”

— Sarah Bessey

15. “God’s vision is a call to move forward into the future in the full operation of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, with a fearlessness that could only come from him.”

— Sarah Bessey

16. “I don’t worry about the Table much anymore. Let’s pray for them, forgive them where they have hurt us, and pray for those wounded in our collective cross fire. Let’s be gentle in our dealings with them, but then let’s get on with it.”

— Sarah Bessey

17. “Then there are my Somewheres. We all need somewhere to say the private things, the vulnerable things, the scary and true things, the victories and the defeats. “I need to say it somewhere,” we say. So then the temptation is to say everything, everywhere, or we end up saying nothing, nowhere. There’s something between oversharing or undersharing our real lives. I have learned – slowly, painfully – to say these private things to my Somewheres.”

— Sarah Bessey

18. “It’s a scary thing, a life-changing, paradigm-shifting thing, to honestly ask yourself this question: Am I moving with God to rescue, restore, and redeem humanity? Or am I clinging fast, eyeteeth clenched, to an imperfect world’s habits and cultural customs, in full knowledge of injustice or imperfections, living at odds with God’s dream for his daughters and sons?”

— Sarah Bessey

19. “Women have more to offer the church than mad decorating skills or craft nights. I look around: I see women who can offer strategic leadership, wisdom, counsel, and teaching.”

— Sarah Bessey

20. “Here is something I’ve learned about miracles: Miracles sometimes look like a kapow! lightning-strike revelation; and sometimes miracles look like showing up for your counseling appointments. Sometimes miracles look like medication and patience and discipline. Sometimes it’s the daily unsexy work of loving people and choosing justice, even if no one ever notices.”

— Sarah Bessey

21. “For the sake of the gospel, women must speak – and teach and minister and prophesy, too. For the sake of the gospel, a woman must be free to walk in her God-breathed self as the ezer kenegdo in whatever vocation and season and place of her life. And she does all of this alongside her brothers, as the ezer warrior of Creation’s intent, to see God’s Kingdom come and his expressed will done.”

— Sarah Bessey

22. “My prayer is that the Holy Spirit would sweep into our lives with holy disruption, upending our assumptions and privileges, our greed and selfishness, our pride and our stupor. To empower our work and our witness. Like Zechariah 4:6 tells us, not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.”

— Sarah Bessey

23. “Many of the seminal social issues of our time – poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse – can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purposes, and character of God.”

— Sarah Bessey

24. “I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord.”

— Sarah Bessey

25. “Whether it’s racism, patriarchy, warmongering, greed, or child trafficking, it’s counter to God’s Kingdom. But the people caught in those systems are rarely the enemies; often they are just as caught, as longing for a rescue as the rest of us. We don’t battle against flesh and blood, not really, but against the powers and principalities that hold us all captive.”

— Sarah Bessey

26. “I won’t desecrate beauty with cynicism anymore. I won’t confuse critical thinking with a critical spirit, and I will practice, painfully, over and over, patience and peace until my gentle answers turn away even my own wrath. I will breathe fresh air while I learn, all over again, grace freely given and wisdom honored; and when my fingers fumble, whenI sound flat or sharp, I will simply try again.”

— Sarah Bessey

27. “Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic – work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don’t let the lies fence you in or hold you back.”

— Sarah Bessey

28. “Hey, we don’t have all the time in the world here to play safe little church club for ladies; we have a lot of loving to do right now, so let’s get on that.” It.”

— Sarah Bessey

29. “One of the great surprises of the Church is the space to ask questions. Sure, there are some places and communities where that isn’t true; but in the Church overall, there is likely room for you – room to learn and change. And then to learn you’re not alone. We have company for the journey. There is a long legacy of troublemakers and question askers; there’s a lot more room than we think.”

— Sarah Bessey

30. “I don’t want to be swallowed by the darkness. Nor do I want to be blinded by the beautiful facade. No, I want to be part of a people who see the darkness, know it’s real, and then, then, then, light a candle anyway. And hold that candle up against the wind and pass along our light wherever it’s needed from our own homes to the halls of legislation to the church pulpit to the kitchens of the world.”

— Sarah Bessey

31. “People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter.”

— Sarah Bessey

32. “So may there be grace and kindness, gentleness and love in our hearts, especially for the ones who we believe are profoundly wrong. The Good News is proclaimed when we love each other. I pray for unity beyond conformity, because loving-kindness preaches the gospel more beautifully and truthfully than any satirical blog post or point-by-point dismantling of another disciple’s reputation and teaching.”

— Sarah Bessey

33. “Yes, we need scholars and academics, leaders and ministers. And we need people like me – low-church, untrained laity who are a bit sloppy at times – to grapple with the deep theological issues, bringing our stories, our wisdom, our experiences, our knowledge to the larger conversation. Everyone gets to play.”

— Sarah Bessey

34. “I find God most in that wild tang, in the sparse and open space, in the unresolved colors, even in the doubt and the uncelebrated places of our lives often neglected by theologians and philosophers. Perhaps that’s why I keep wrestling with this story of God, with the unresolved Jesus, with the wind and fire and water of the Spirit; there’s an edge to the story, more than we acknowledge at times.”

— Sarah Bessey

35. “I’ve wanted to be more like my dad almost every day of my life, but I am still me: unable to be too certain because of my uncanny ability to see eight sides to every issue and my yearning for peace above all else, unable to be much more than on the outside edge of the inside, with an eye on the ones for whom the truth is perhaps not true.”

— Sarah Bessey

36. “I’m a Christian. And until the day when the world automatically understands that to mean that I believe in the full humanity and personhood of both men and women, you can also call me a feminist.”

— Sarah Bessey

37. “Really, theology is simply what we think about God and then living that truth out in our right-now life.”

— Sarah Bessey

38. “We reject the lies of inequality, we affirm the Spirit, we forgive radically, we advocate for love and demonstrate it by folding laundry, and we live these Kingdom ways of shalom prophetically in the world.”

— Sarah Bessey

39. “We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verse about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness.”

— Sarah Bessey

40. “And now for me, faith is less of a brick edifice of belief and doctrine and right answers than it is a wide-open sky ringed with pine trees black against a cold sunset, an altar, a welcome, bread and wine, an unfathomably ferocious love, and a profound sense of my belovedness.”

— Sarah Bessey

41. “We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.”

— Sarah Bessey

42. “I was reading voraciously about global issues such as clean water, community development, war, human trafficking, economics, disaster relief, the AIDS crisis, unjust systemic evil. Meanwhile, church budgets made room for a brand-new light show and a kickin’ sound system or a trip to Disneyland or a video venue in a saturated upscale neighborhood – all in an effort to practice creative-experience marketing.”

— Sarah Bessey

43. “I am an exile in this fallen and broken world, here to plant gardens and to prepare for the coming day when all things will be renewed and restored, to tend to the earth and to humanity – and my place in the world – with tender ferocity. We are participating in the life of Christ.”

— Sarah Bessey

44. “Spirituality is always eventually about what you do with your pain. – Fr. Richard Rohr.”

— Sarah Bessey

45. “It’s dangerous to cherry-pick a few stand-alone verses, particularly when they are used as a weapon to silence and intimidate, effectively benching half the church5 in the midst of holy harvest season when the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.”

— Sarah Bessey

46. “We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world’s dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language.”

— Sarah Bessey

47. “Justice is often born in the quiet and ordinary moments long before it’s seen by anyone else. Sometimes it’s as simple and as difficult as listening, as learning, as laying down our excuses or justifications or disguises, as forgiveness, as choosing the hard daily work of restoration, as staying resolutely alive when everyone else is numbing themselves against it.”

— Sarah Bessey

48. “We first take our everyday, ordinary life – our sleeping, eating, going-to-work life – and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for us is the best thing we can do for him. When we fix our attention on God, we’ll be changed from the inside out. We’ll readily recognize what he wants from us and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around us, always dragging us down to its level of immaturity, God brings out the best in us, develops well-formed maturity.”3.”

— Sarah Bessey

49. “We pit our pain against God, holding tally and requiring meaning, instead of saying the truth: This isn’t God’s will.”

— Sarah Bessey

50. “God has a global dream for his daughters and his sons, and it is bigger than our narrow interpretations or small box constructions of “biblical manhood and womanhood” or feminism;.”

— Sarah Bessey