A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father—the pastor of the church—that she wasn't sure she could go through with it. She didn't know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn't know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever." What you promise when you are confirmed," said Julian's father, "is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.

— Lauren F. Winner

And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.

— Lauren F. Winner

But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain.

— Lauren F. Winner

But if remoteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.

— Lauren F. Winner

Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.

— Lauren F. Winner

Food is part of God's creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him.... The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

— Lauren F. Winner

God cares about our dietary choices. This should come as no surprise; you only have to read the first two chapters of Genesis to see God's concern for food. Humanity's first sin was disobedience manifested in a choice about eating. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted, except the one fruit they chose. And the New Testament makes clear that God cares about the most basic quotidian aspect of our lives. (Our God, after all, is the God who provides for the sparrows and numbers the hairs on our heads.) This God who is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies - He is also interested in how we live with food.

— Lauren F. Winner

... I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.

— Lauren F. Winner

I knew, as soon as I woke up, that the dream had come from God, and it was about the reality of Jesus. The truth of Him. The was a person whose pronouns you had to capitalize. That He was God.

— Lauren F. Winner

In the words of Jewish liturgical scholar Lawrence Hoffman, 'Jews do offer freely composed prayers... But overall, it is the fixed order and content of Jewish prayer that gives it its distinctiveness and that demands the personal commitment to prayer as a discipline.

— Lauren F. Winner