William P. Young Quotes & Sayings

I'm an accidental writer. — William P. Young

The ability to choose is at the essential core of our grandeur. Even evil exists because God respects our ability to choose. — William P. Young

I think people are tired of religion and how it divides and damages people. You can name it whatever you want, Islam or Christianity, but if you have a system in which God is distant and angry all the time, and you're trying to please him through the right disciplines, it isn't going to work for everyone. — William P. Young

I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had
Plato's white grandfatherly god
because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids. — William P. Young

The intricacy and the inherent beautiful fragility of the human soul is such that it is uniquely damaged and only God knows how to heal it, and it's going to take time. — William P. Young

Emotions are the colors of the soul. — William P. Young

There is only one race ... and it is human! — William P. Young

I grew up fundamentalist, evangelical, Protestant. Those are my roots, and they are good roots. But it means the Pharisees are my people. I grew up with an image of God that was not helpful
largely the face of my father expanded. — William P. Young

I don't see the Father pouring out his wrath on the Son. I see the human race pouring out their wrath on the Son. So I see the only hope for the entire cosmos is what the Son chooses to accept, crawling upon the instrument of our greatest wrath. He met us at the deepest, darkest place. — William P. Young

The God of Evangelical Christianity is a Monster. — William P. Young

Part of my journey is to say that the soul of the human being must be a massively intricate, wonderful creation that God has a respect for in ways that we do not and that leaves a huge amount of space to go explore. — William P. Young

Our earth is like a child who has grown up without parents, having no one to guide her ... Some have attempted to help her but most have simply tried to use her. Humans, who have been given the task to lovingly steer the world, instead plunder her with no consideration, other than their immediate needs. And they give little thought for their own children who will inherit their lack of love. So they use her and abuse her with little consideration and then when she shudders of blows her breath. They are offended and raise their fist at God. — William P. Young

I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy
schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus
He likes me
but He came to save me from God the Father
who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down. — William P. Young

I'm not an actual author but an accidental one. — William P. Young

The Gospel is a declaration of something totally finished apart from our agreement or vote. Inside that declaration is an ongoing and relentless invitation to deepening relationship but any lack of belief or participation on our part has no power to negate the accomplished truth of that declaration. — William P. Young

City and country
each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns
cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business
that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically. — William P. Young

Evangelicals have like millions of rules. And it's just, uh, we have sort of an accepted, rationalism within which we frame religion. And we think that belief, intellectually, is of the same as relationship. And in our Western family conversation, that's become an incredible impediment toward actual wholeness, where the heart and the head are aligned and relationship
with not just God but with each other. — William P. Young

Look at us human beings: it's so much easier to be right than to love. — William P. Young

It is my desire and intent to trust the multi-layered good purposes of God than in what humans fabricate out of their need and experience. I specifically ask not to know these purposes so that I might remain a child in their unfolding. — William P. Young

I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be. — William P. Young

And when you learn, over the course of your life, that it's not about pleasing God, it's about learning how to trust God. That's a huge watershed, because trust is a whole different ballgame than appeasement or pleasing. — William P. Young

Emotions talked to you before you had words, so listen to them ... they are often more honest than the mind's remarkable ability to self deceive. — William P. Young

You cannot heal yourself. You cannot heal anybody else. We're designed to do this in community because we were created inside community for community by community. — William P. Young

I wrote a story for my kids. It's fiction. It's not systematic theology. It's not a new book of the Bible. It's flawed, I wrote it. All of that goes into the mix, but I love the controversy. It elevates the conversation. — William P. Young

I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people. — William P. Young

It wasn't long ago I was cleaning toilets and now I have protestors. How cool is this? — William P. Young

We've created a theology in the West of a God who is fundamentally self-centered. The imagery of God as distant, unapproachable, unreachable
that's not a God who is relational. It is a God that gets to declare or judge when he gets pissed off. But there is no basis for love and relationships if God is a fundamentally self-centered being. — William P. Young

I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family. — William P. Young

Much as I venerate the name of Newton, I am not obliged to believe that he was infallible. I see ... with regret that he was liable to err, and that his authority has, perhaps, sometimes even retarded the progress of science. — William P. Young

It's always been you know, religion that has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God, because it creates a mythology about performance
that you can perform your way into the appeasement of the deity. And you know, when you're born inside the cultural framework that I was, and you're born inside the religious traditions that I was, that becomes your understanding of spirituality: That it's about trying to please God. So, it's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are. — William P. Young

You have to take the time to prepare the soil if you want to embrace the seed. — William P. Young

Jesus is not the 'founder of Christianity.' — William P. Young

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness. — William P. Young

The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity. — William P. Young

I believe that, that Christ became sin for us. — William P. Young

It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real. — William P. Young

Jesus was always challenging the dogma of religion. So, you know, it's not like I'm out there by myself. — William P. Young

Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that's a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are. — William P. Young

Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around. You, on the other hand, were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around. Living unloved is like clipping a bird's wings and removing its ability to fly. Not something I want for you. Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly. And if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place. — William P. Young

Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true. — William P. Young

Today's minor irritations may become tomorrow's treasured memories. We often don't know what we are missing, until it's missing. — William P. Young

I give you an ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful. — William P. Young

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it's just not real. That's what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happen, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded. — William P. Young

It seems like
especially in religious circles and Christian circles, we want to first talk about the things we're opposed to. That means we have to categorize that person. We can call them emergent or neo orthodox or someone who feminizes scripture. There's the category, let's stick them in the category then just blow up the box and him along with it. — William P. Young

My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father
very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God. — William P. Young

Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time. — William P. Young

For me, everything is about Jesus and Father and the Holy Spirit, and relationships, and life is an adventure of faith lived one day at a time. Any aspirations, visions and dreams died a long time ago and I have absolutely no interest in resurrecting them (they would stink by now anyway). I have finally figured out that I have nothing to lose by living a life of faith. I know more joy every minute of every day than seems appropriate, but I love the wastefulness of my Father's grace and presence. For me, everything in my life that matters, is perfect! — William P. Young

I think one of the greatest losses to humanity was the domination of women. I think every religious system has found ways to be kind to them in a kind of subordinate way. Very patronizing, very colonial. But if you start looking at the fabric of society, even religious systems, they would fall apart if it wasn't for the embedded ability of the women who are involved. — William P. Young

Thank goodness there are women in our lives
that's all I can say. We get saved by the women in our lives. — William P. Young

I really do believe that God is love, one of deep affection and grace and forgiveness and inspiration. — William P. Young

I'm trying to get far away from [picturing God as] Gandalf or Santa Claus. — William P. Young

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming. — William P. Young

Religion and anger has gone together a lot, historically. My father, being very religious and angry, was trying to reconcile the ideas of love and forgiveness with damage in his own heart. We historically create God in the image of someone who will redeem us, or someone who has damaged us. A lot of my imaginations of God was a projection of my own damage because of my father. God is good but he has a lot of expectations, of which I have failed
just like my dad. But I don't think it's truthful to create God as a projection of either our damage or our altruism. — William P. Young