'Would you sit down for just a moment?'

In 1997, when teacher, preacher, and columnist Barbara Brown Taylor went from full-time pastoring to full-time teaching, I suspect that many of us who knew her only through her columns in The Christian Century welcomed the thought that she'd have more time for writing.

But as she reported last month in her May 4 column, she began to wonder how much she could cope with when she found herself agreeing to play a role in a Piedmont College, Georgia, stage production. It was every bit as time-consuming as she'd guessed it would be. Still, in typical Taylor fashion, she not only coped well with her six-minute monologue on stage but was able to use the experience to enrich her teaching and preaching.

For the first time, she says, she saw that Holy Scripture is a script, and that holy words are not meant to stay on pages. Yet the "performance" of Scripture calls for more than the mere presentation of passages "we all know" in a livelier way, because one is dealing here with the Scripture that "none of us knows until we have taken the words inside ourselves, entering into the live risks, mysteries, decisions, and relationships that they require of us."

A few days ago, Taylor confirmed to me that in her life as a full-time religion professor she certainly has more time to read, write, think, and pray than she did as a parish minister. "But I live with the same time constraints that other people do, and every day offers me a fresh opportunity to get my priorities in order."

When I asked her what sustains her through her extraordinarily busy days and evenings, she didn't hesitate for a moment: "Jesus' saying 'Consider the lilies, how they grow' keeps me mindful; my father's asking 'If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?' keeps me careful; and my husband's loving 'Would you sit down here beside me for just a moment?' keeps me human."

She says she certainly never lacks for writing ideas. "My life with students, family, farm animals, neighbors, and seasons is so rich that as long as I practice a certain degree of mindfulness, I have more ideas than I can tackle in a single day."

Taylor has an extraordinary ability to surprise you with fresh takes on new-old truths about many things. For example, your relationship with God and with those around you. "The truth," she writes in Home By Another Way (Cowley Publications, Boston, Massachusetts), "is always more than any one of us can grasp all by ourselves. It takes a world full of strangers and friends to tell us the parts we cannot see, and sometimes we want to kill them for it." And she explains: "In the church, we are dared to believe that it is God who makes us a community and not we ourselves, and that our differences are God's best tools for opening us up to the truth that is bigger than we are."

Elsewhere in Home By Another Way, she suggests that people of faith should try not to fall short of the Apostle Paul's vision that God's healing power should be known "not only in this age but also in the age to come" (Eph. 1:21, New Revised Standard Version).

"While we argue amongst ourselves about everything from what kind of music we will sing in church, to who may marry whom," she writes, "the next generation walks right past our doors without even looking in. If they are searching at all, they are searching for more than we are offering them—for a place where they may sense the presence of God, among people who show some sign of having been changed by that presence."

I have no doubt that in her writing and in her work at Piedmont, Taylor will continue to bring many young people closer to that place.