Top 40 Tish Harrison Warren Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Rebekka is what Madeline L’Engle called a “friend of my right hand.”1 She’s the kind of friend – one of just a handful – whose life has become so bundled up with mine that I can’t make sense of me without her. She knows me, good and bad. We share a passion for beauty, butter, and urban design, and an indulgence for chips and TV, which we enjoyed together every Wednesday night when we lived on the same street. We love each other.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

2. “We are not left like Sisyphus, cursed by the gods to a life of meaninglessness, repeating the same pointless task for eternity. Instead, these small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful because they are the site of our worship.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

3. “If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths – doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology – rub against the texture of an average day. How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

4. “My theology was too big to touch a typical day in my life. I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

5. “Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

6. “Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

7. “But in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown, beginning on the smallest scale, in the daily grind, in homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Daily habits of peace or habits of discord spill into our city, creating cultures of peace or cultures of discord.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

8. “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

9. “Flannery O’Connor once told a young friend to “push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

10. “Christian friendships are call-and-response friendships. We tell each other over and over, back and forth, the truth of who we are and who God is. Over dinner and on walks, dropping off soup when someone is sick, and in prayer over the phone, we speak the good news to each other. And we become good news to every other.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

11. “When my daughters were baptized, we had a big celebration with cupcakes and champagne. Together with our community we sang “Jesus Loves Me” over the newly baptized. It was a proclamation: before you know it, before you doubt it, before you confess it, before you can sing it yourself, you are beloved by God, not by your effort but because of what Christ has done on your behalf. We are weak, but he is strong.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

12. “But in facing the reality of death, we learn how to live rightly. We learn how to live in light of our limits and the brevity of our lives. And we learn to live in the hope of the resurrection.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

13. “How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

14. “In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

15. “Apocalypse literally means an unveiling or uncovering. In my anger, grumbling, self-berating, cursing, doubt, and despair, I glimpsed, for a few minutes, how tightly I cling to control and how little control I actually have. And in the absence of control, feeling stuck and stressed, those parts of me that I prefer to keep hidden were momentarily unveiled.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

16. “Jesus is eternally beloved by the Father. His every activity unfurls from his identity as the Beloved. He loved others, healed others, preached, taught, rebuked, and redeemed not in order gain the Father’s approval, but out of his rooted certainty in the Father’s love.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

17. “I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

18. “In the nitty-gritty of my daily life, repentance for idolatry may look as pedestrian as shutting off my email an hour earlier or resisting that alluring clickbait to go to bed.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

19. “I’m a pacifist who yells at her husband.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

20. “The truth is, I’m far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment than I am for prayer. When I turn on Hulu late at night I don’t consciously think, “I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body.” But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

21. “The one who is worthy of worship, glory, and fanfare spent decades in obscurity and ordinariness. As if the incarnation itself is not mind-bending enough, the incarnate God spent his days quietly, a man who went to work, got sleepy, and lived a pedestrian life among average people.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

22. “Old Testament prophets are terrible at tea parties.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

23. “I worry that when our gathered worship looks like a rock show or an entertainment special, we are being formed as consumers – people after a thrill and a rush – when what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

24. “Christ’s ordinary years are part of our redemption story. Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

25. “Or, more painfully, it’s not just that I’m mad about your criticism today, it’s how a pattern of criticism, comment by passing comment, bumps up against my own patterns of sin, woundedness, and self-defensiveness. Today’s conflict is not.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

26. “The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

27. “Anne Lamott writes that we learn the practice of reconciliation by starting with those nearest us. “Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

28. “Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

29. “Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer: I am a worshiper and an image-bearer, created to know, enjoy, and glorify God and to know and love those around me.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

30. “What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?”

— Tish Harrison Warren

31. “He anoints the bathroom mirror with oil and prays that when people look into it, they would see themselves as beloved images of God. He prays that they would not relate to their bodies with the categories the world gives them, but instead according to the truth of who they are in Christ.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

32. “In this alternative economy of the true bread of life, we are turned inside out so that we are no longer people marked by scarcity, jockeying for our own good, but are new people, truly nourished, and therefore able to extend nourishment to others. The economy of the Eucharist is true abundance.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

33. “The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul” to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

34. “But here’s the thing: pretty good people do not need Jesus. He came for the lost. He came for the broken. In his love for us he came to usher us into his foundness and wholeness.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

35. “I’m fairly certain that one day there will be three numbers engraved on my tombstone as a legacy and a warning: my birth date, my death date, and the number of unopened emails still awaiting a response in my inbox.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

36. “Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his followers to do something impressive or mystical – climb a mountain, fast for forty days, or have a trippy sweat lodge ceremony – but instead he picks the most ordinary of acts, eating, through which to be present to his people. He says that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. He chooses the unremarkable and plain, average and abundant, bread and wine.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

37. “The habit of praying before my meal trains me in a way of being-in-the-world. It reminds me that my personal experience is not what determines whether or not something is a grace and a wonder, and that some of the most astonishing gifts are the most easily overlooked.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

38. “Together as a church we are practicing, learning the strokes that teach us to live our lives.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

39. “Having a body is a lot of work.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

40. “We are born hungry and completely dependent on others to meet our needs. In this way the act of eating reorients us from an atomistic, independent existence toward one that is interdependent. But the Eucharist goes even further. In it, we feast on Christ, and are thereby mysteriously formed together into one body, the body of Christ.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

41. “We don’t wake up daily and form a way of being-in-the-world from scratch, and we don’t think our way through every action of our day. We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

42. “Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6 I came across Dillard’s words a couple years before I went to seminary, and throughout those years of heady theological study I kept them in my back pocket. They remind me that today is the proving ground of what I believe and of whom I worship.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

43. “We’ll spend our day conservative or liberal, rich or poor, earnest or cynical, fun-loving or serious. But as we first emerge from sleep, we are nothing but human, unimpressive, vulnerable, newly born into the day, blinking as our pupils adjust to light and our brains emerge into consciousness.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

44. “Rich Mullins, one of my favorite writers and musicians, said that when he was a kid he’d walk down the church aisle and be “born again again” or “rededicate” his life to Christ every year at camp. In college he’d do it about every six months, then quarterly; by the time he was in his forties it was “about four times a day.”3 Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

45. “We do not know this Messiah solely through the red letters in the gospel texts. We know him in his fullness because we are joined to him in his Body, the church. In this joining, we do not lose our individuality or our individual stories of conversion and encounter with Christ. Instead, our own small stories are wrapped up in the story of all believers throughout time, which are together part of the eternal story of Christ.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

46. “Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

47. “When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

48. “My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.”

— Tish Harrison Warren

49. “Theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues that to truly learn a story, we can’t just hear it. We must also act it out. In our worship – and Hauerwas specifically cites the practices of baptism and communion – we act out the story of the gospel with and through our bodies.”

— Tish Harrison Warren