As someone who, from time to time, considers himself a writer, it’s nice sometimes to hear someone I respect a great deal address the ins and outs the details of the writing trade.

I’ve read all but one of Donald Miller’s books in the past few years, but A Million Miles in a Thousand Years was a bit of a different journey than the others. Miller’s normal style is to meander through a loosely-related collection of thoughts and ideas as a way to talk about a few epiphanies he’s had about how to live life fully. In Million Miles, he does this, but through a different lens: how to write a good story.

The book starts out with Don meeting with a couple guys who want to turn his biggest seller, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. So he goes off to, in essence, edit his own life from a disorganized series of thoughts into a story that’s worth putting on the screen.

In this process, he realizes that, in his 30s, single, childless and without many accomplishments aside from writing a couple books, he has not been writing his own story well. Not the one for the movie, but his actual life.

So, as he is explaining to us, the reader, how to tell a good story, we see him growing and evolving into a person who writes a good story of a life. I won’t spoil it, even though it’s only sort of a story, but I will say that the place that Miller came to by the end of this book were an impressive array of accomplishments that are the mini-stories that make up a good story, from start to finish.

As always, Miller is a quick and easy read, but that makes books like his all the more enjoyable. It’s effortless to get right into the ideas he’s expressing without the language or headiness getting in the way. I sped through A Million Miles, soaking up what it means to live a good story: learning to see obstacles as turning points that shouldn’t be shied away from; seeking out and creating challenging goals to push yourself forward when life becomes monotonous; learning the value of taking risks; realizing that the joy of life is found in trials and journeys, not where those trials and journeys end.

I wouldn’t say this is a book about writers for writers, but it does open up to the basic ideas of story, while reminding us that, in order to enjoy life, we need to engage ourselves in it and actually live.

It’s absolutely no secret that I’m a Donald Miller fan. Maybe slightly less known is the fact that I love road trips, traveling and leaving places in general, especially stories about such things. They are always ripe with epiphany and growth in their characters.

Through Painted Deserts is a true story about Miller himself, who, in his younger years, jumped in a van with a friend in his hometown of Houston and meandered his way to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today (I hear).

It’s noticeably less spiritually-conceived than Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What, with much more emphasis on storytelling, character development and descriptive writing. No complaints from me. Miller’s a wonderful writer, no matter the subject.

Still, though, those road trip epiphanies and growth are there. And it was clearly no mistake that I was reading this book while on my first international adventure in Thailand, for in his introduction, he offers a simple command to the reader: Leave. As in, get out of where you’re comfortable, even if for a little while. Go out and see the world, learn how you differ from others and what they do better that you could stand to improve upon. This was, coincidentally, a common subject of discussion between my travel partner, Buddy, and I.

Now, enjoy some random Don Miller quotes:

I had only recently begun questioning my faith in God, a kind of commercial, American version of spirituality. I had questions because of the silliness of its presuppositions. The rising question of why had been manifesting for some time, and had previously only been answered by Western Christianity’s propositions of behavior modification. What is beauty? I would ask. Here are the five keys to a successful marriage, I would be given as an answer. It was as if nobody was listening to the question being groaned by all of creation, groaned through the pinings of our sexual tensions, our broken biochemistry, the blending of light and smog to make our glorious sunsets.

I was raised to believe that the quality of a man’s life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart’s knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler.

I love that second one especially. And it ties in with my next book review heavily, which you’ll see tomorrow, as well as my recent post about buying phones.

One more book down on my reading list, fourteen more to go!

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

The hijacking of the concept of morality began, of course, when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules. It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover… If we think of God’s grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt…
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In this way, it isn’t only the moralist looking for a feeling of superiority who commits crimes against God, it is also those of us who react by doing what we want, claiming God’s grace. Neither view of morality connects behavior to a relational exchange with Jesus. When I run a stop sign, for example, I am breaking a law against a system of rules, but if I cheat on my wife, I have broken a law against a person. The first is impersonal; the latter is intensely personal.

…the call to morality is delivered through a changed and forgiven heart, a heart regenerated and delivered by Christ.

Morality is the end, not the means. From the outside, people often don’t see this distinction and assume Christians get to heaven by being moral, when the opposite is true: we are moral because Christ has given us heaven.

If we could be more transparent about the motivation behind our morality, I believe we wouldn’t have so many people seeing Christians as a club of hypocrites and judgmental Pharisees. The question is: how do we do that?

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

It seems that we feel we must trust people before we let them know anything remotely vulnerable about us, and to ask for more before trust has been built is to contravene a social etiquette dating back to the fall of man. All this, I suppose, is connected to the fact that our validation seems to always be in question.

And yet it is through this system of defense Christ walks with ease, never seeming to fear taht He would do damage by rummaging around in the tender complexity of a person’s identity. Instead, He goes nearly immediately to our greatest fears, our most injured spaces, and speaks into those places with authority.

Perhaps another argument in favor of radical honesty? Or maybe this is something Jesus was uniquely qualified to do. Makes me wonder where the line is drawn in our striving to be like Christ.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems and oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and sadly, their greatest tragedies.
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The better basketball team? the alien might question, wondering out loud why twenty thousand people would show up to find out which basketball team was better than the other.
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You are trying to feel right by comparing yourself to others. It is ridiculous. Who told you there was anything wrong with you in the first place? Don’t you know that a human is just a human?
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Listen to the conversations you have for the next week… you’ll probably hear a hidden conversation beneath the real conversation. Stuff like movies and food and people become ideas, and we all are deciding whether we’re on the right or wrong side of these ideas, knowing that if we aren’t on the right side, there is a price to pay.

Here Miller took the perspective of an alien to our world, trying to see the underlying drive of the human psyche from an external perspective. He argues that the driving motivation of most of our actions is to compare ourselves to everyone else, judge others and to find ways to be seen as better than others.

It’s the social food chain. We don’t do much to improve humanity if all we care about is appearing good to those around us. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t make much sense given, as Miller said, the brevity of our existence and the fact that we are all humans, none better than any other.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

…Moses, unlike most writers in Scripture, would stop the narrative to break into [poetry], a kind of poetry called parallelism, which is when you say something and then repeat it using different phrasing. [The] way Moses wrote wasn’t unlike the way people who write musicals stop the story every once in a while to break into song.
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The reason Moses would do this… is because there are emotions and situations and tensions that a human being feels in his life but can’t explain. And poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he isn’t alone in those emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.
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I wondered if when we take Christian theology out of the context of its narrative, when we ignore the poetry in which it is presented, when we turn it into formulas to help us achieve the American dream, we lose its meaning entirely, and the ideas become fodder for the head but have no impact on the way we live our lives or think about God. This is, perhaps, why people are so hostile toward religion.

A great, albeit indirect, argument for reconciling art and the gospel. Like Schaeffer said, evangelical Christians “have tended to relegate art to the very fringe of life” rather than embrace it as a fundamental tool to help comprehend that which is beyond our words, formulas and theology.

I finished reading book number four on my 2009 reading list: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Miller has proved once again that he writes the books and exact statements I wish I were capable of writing. This week I’ll be posting bits of the book I wish I’d written.

I didn’t have a relationship with God; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right.
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If God didn’t answer the serious questions about life, then I didn’t have any responsibility to believe He existed.
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I tell you all this only to say I came back to God. All the complexity about life was begging for an explanation; and me actually being god wasn’t answering very many questions. And so in a way, I left the old god of easy answers… But I left room open for another God, a God who might explain my existence…
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With God… it was as though a thread had been pulled from the fabric to reveal a thread of a different color, a color less me-pleasing, but a color all the same. God was still there. I tried to shake Him, but I couldn’t find a place where He wasn’t.

This series of quotes from a story Miller tells of himself denying God then eventually coming back to Him hits home. The way he describes his thoughts before, during and after all of this remind me so much of myself at certain points in my faith.

There have been several times, especially in the past year, where I was one step away from concluding that the God I thought I knew, the one presented to me my whole life, was shallow and self-contradicting and therefore must not exist. I toed the line of agnosticism (or, as some call it, “polite atheism”) for months.

After much talking and and processing, it became clear that the god I had believed in truly did not exist. What took its place, though, was the one true God. The old god was one built by evangelical ideas that could be broken down into simple explanations, elementary ideas and lists of rules.

What followed was a feeling of contempt against the evangelical church and Western Christian culture as a whole. I felt betrayed and misled, as though what I knew of the Church had intentionally been hiding the truth of a God beyond our ideas and simple explanations in an effort to make Christianity and faith easy to process and digest.

Faith is neither simple nor easy as I once believed; it’s the most difficult thing in the world. While it may seem contradictory, it seems to me that as I have stripped away those empty ideas, the foundations of my faith have become simpler, but have opened up an infinite, complex, and highly unexplainable world of ideas about what it means to know God and to be in relationship with Him.