Barbara Blackburn

“You can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees. It’s one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God’s name; it’s another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.

With Jesus, what we see again and again is that it’s never just a person, or just a meal, or just an event, because there’s always more going on just below the surface.”
― Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God

“This is one of the reasons we watch movies, attend recovery groups, read memoirs, and sit around campfires telling stories long after the fire has dwindled down to a few glowing embers. It’s written in the Psalms that “deep calls to deep,” which is what happens when you get a glimpse of what someone else has gone through or is currently in the throes of and you find yourself inextricably, mysteriously linked with that person because you have been reminded again of our common humanity and its singular source, the subsurface unity of all things that is ever before us in countless manifestations but requires eyes wide open to see it burst into view.”
― Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God

“Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can’t say; meaning always resides within a larger mystery; knowing always takes place within unknowing; whatever has been revealed to us surrounded by that which hasn’t been revealed to us.”
― Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God

“In one of the accounts of Jesus’s death we read that the curtain in the temple of God—the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God’s presence—

ripped.

One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.

A beautiful idea.

But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.”
― Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God