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Creativity Quote by Larry Norman

"Jesus got me through the slums without getting murdered. I just walked with him as though he were really there and not a spirit just floating around"

About this Quote

There is bravado in this line, but it is the bravado of a man who knows the street can puncture theory. Larry Norman isn’t offering a tidy testimony; he’s insisting on a kind of faith that functions like body armor. “The slums” establishes a world where danger is not metaphorical, and “without getting murdered” is purposely blunt, almost jarring in its lack of pious euphemism. The phrase drags spirituality out of stained-glass abstraction and drops it into a place where survival is the first language.

Norman’s real provocation is in the second sentence: “as though he were really there.” It’s a refusal of the Christian habit of softening Jesus into an idea, an aura, a “spirit just floating around.” The subtext reads like a quiet indictment of comfortable believers: if your Christ is only a vibe, he won’t walk with you into risk, poverty, or ugliness. Norman’s Jesus is physical in the way companionship is physical, a presence that changes how you move through a room, how you meet strangers’ eyes, how you manage fear.

Context matters: Norman helped pioneer Christian rock, a genre built on collapsing the wall between sacred talk and secular sound. This quote does the same work. It frames faith not as escape from the world but as a practiced posture inside it, with the ego-sized edge of a performer who’s also trying to sell an argument: real belief isn’t decorative. It’s operational.

Quote Details

TopicFaith
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Norman, Larry. (2026, January 15). Jesus got me through the slums without getting murdered. I just walked with him as though he were really there and not a spirit just floating around. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/jesus-got-me-through-the-slums-without-getting-147478/

Chicago Style
Norman, Larry. "Jesus got me through the slums without getting murdered. I just walked with him as though he were really there and not a spirit just floating around." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/jesus-got-me-through-the-slums-without-getting-147478/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Jesus got me through the slums without getting murdered. I just walked with him as though he were really there and not a spirit just floating around." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/jesus-got-me-through-the-slums-without-getting-147478/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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Larry Norman: Jesus as companion in the slums
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About the Author

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Larry Norman (April 8, 1947 - February 24, 2008) was a Musician from USA.

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