A Million Miles to See Donald Miller

(Gross exaggeration - it was only about 70 miles - but try saying that title with your mouth full of peanut butter!)

Say what you want about Donald Miller, but people resonate with him. Kendra and I, along with our friend Faith trekked off to Baltimore to hear him speak the other night. I went straight after work and didn't get home till almost midnight - but it was well worth the trip. He has been touring around the country promoting his new book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and talking to people about this newfound passion - The Mentoring Project. He is also serving on President Obama's Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families, where I know he will make a tremendous difference. (Here's his tour schedule.)

The gathering the other night was in this beautifully subdued Presbyterian church. I typically don't attend church buildings of that stature - but found I was taken in with this simple elegance. The surroundings seemed fitting. The conversation opened with Susan Issacs who shared with a lot of energy and humor about a time when she was angry with God. It was pretty engaging. Donald Miller followed. Although I have seen pictures of him, including one very overly large one that was hanging outside the church just in case we were tempted to miss it, I was taken in by how he spoke with the same casual conversational style with which he writes.

I was also pretty excited to meet up with my online friend Wendy, also a writer. She is the one that told me about the book and book tour, knowing that I too was a Donald Miller fan. I devoured the new book within days of receiving it - a major accomplishment for me in this phase of life where I have so little time and such inability to concentrate. His talk put breath and humanity to his words. It was inspiring on many levels. As a writer, I was inspired to write a good story, and as a human being I was inspired to live one. He talks about all of the elements of story and relates that to the narrative aspect of the Bible. He talked about how no good story is without conflict, and how we can make choices to enter a story that can have an impact on the world. He talked about the things that may be said of us as "those Christians" as we engage our faith in the world around us for the better. Hearing this out loud made me stop being ashamed of calling myself a Christian. It had beauty and depth and meaning. I wondered for a long time on the way home how I had let that be stolen from me as a follower of Christ.

After the talk, there was a meet and greet time to have your books signed. All the hand-shaking and touching compelled me to approach the table with my hand sanitizer gel at the ready for our host, but I restrained the urge lest I look like a freaky germ-o-phobe. Kendra had my book to sign and was ecstatic at getting to meet her "favorite author". I stood behind them. I didn't say a word. I didn't shake a hand. I was in that writer's space in my head and found that I was content to stand behind them and take in the moment.

When we left I was overwhelmed with thankfulness.

Food for Thought - Salvation part 2

A lot of good comments on this post. I will say that it surprises me that anyone would say that they would be disappointed if everyone were able to be sure of heaven. The very heartbeat of God is that none should perish, and I think it ought to be ours as well. It seems arrogant to say that my sin is different from the sins of anyone else, and that my submission and obedience to Christ being where the circle of inclusion and exclusion is drawn. The free gift doesn't seem so free anymore on that line of thinking. The paid price doesn't seem so fully paid. The completed work, incomplete.
If the Bible says all our righteousness is like filthy rags, what do we have to offer that would say we get to go and others don't? Obedience is the fruit of a heart of love, not the obligation that it is painted in so many religious circles. It cannot be contrived - but is the overflow of the gratitude for the too good to be true grace once we comprehend it fully, versus the system of performance and obligation that so many of us were taught.
I am definitely still pondering, seeking, reading, searching. One book that was pretty profound in helping me see the Bible as relational instead of merely instructional was Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. He calls it a "whole message to a whole human being". We tend to look at it as a self-help book instead of this story of the redeeming love, and real human beings with all of their talents and flaws, all along the way. One comment on the first post talked about God's word as an instruction manual - in order to help us get the best of a product we purchased. I appreciated the sentiment as I would have once shared it vehemently. Now I hear it almost opposite - we are the ones who were purchased, and God and His word not something that we use, but something that changes and completes us as we live according to it.
Now lest you think I have gone morally relative, I will say that it is not all good. He is all good. That I believe is the jist of the story.
More thoughts later, as I hope this conversation continues.

Book Heaven

There has never been a time in my life when I was in such heaven about the books that surrounded me and that I could currently put my hands on. I am reading the Donald Miller book - Searching for God Knows What. I know I keep mentioning it – but I just can’t help it! It’s so real and good. Lemme share a little piece of Donald with you:

The scary thing about religion to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is. By that I mean they have Him all figured out, mapped out, and as my pastor, Rick would say, “dissected and put into jars on a shelf.” You’ve got a bunch of Catholics in Rome who think one way about God, and a bunch of Baptists in Texas who think another, and that isn’t even the beginning. It goes on and on and on like this, and it makes me wonder if God created us in His image or if we created Him in ours.

This is amazing. When he starts talking about opinionated, hyper-conservatives who slap God’s name on whatever political agenda they happen to have at the moment he says, and I quote, “People like that should have an island.”

On top of the Donald Miller buzz I currently have going, (or could that be the Blackberry Merlot?) I am surrounded by other books that are feasts for my soul. Two Franky Schaeffer books came from Amazon today – Addicted to Mediocrity – which I used to borrow annually from my friend, Tina – but it is just such a long drive from TX to WV now – and Sham Pearls for Real Swine – a new book on a similar thread. Both of these books are about Christians in the arts. Here’s a little excerpt from the book jacket of Sham Pearls:

What other age beyond our own of anesthetized, plastic propriety could accommodate us? What past leaders would meet our standards of piety? Luther? We would find him vulgar. Shakespeare? Filthy. Bach? Secular. Verdi? Catholic. Joan of Arc? Insane. Winston Churchill? A drunken warmonger. George Washington? A reactionary chauvinist. Jesus of Nazareth? Rude, sexist, offensive, and inscrutable. All of these would be too complicated, too real, too human for the ‘nice’, the timid, the shallow, the ignorant – the church.

Yep – controversial. But real. I love it. I also ordered some Anne Lamott – who I discovered for the first time the other day during a major iced coffee high at Borders. I sat and just drank in her thoughts. I am not sure if I will end up loving her books – but I can be sure they will make me think outside the box.

So here it is – reading for research – to be inspired to write.

Oh – and I’m also reading Gossamer by Lois Lowry with my son – and that book is hard to put down!

I’m in book heaven…….

Struggle to Be Free from the Grip of the Seducer

I was thinking a lot through the weekend about the Bible Study that a small group of us are embarking on via a yahoo group. It isn’t just about being overweight or what you eat, but more about a heart of idolatry. This morning I was reading my new Donald Miller Book, Searching for God Knows What, and read something that really spoke to this issue. It is a bit lengthy – but I pray God may use it to speak to at least one heart like it spoke to mine.

I’ve a friend who overhead his wife on the phone with another man. She did not know he was in the house, and he walked up behind her, leaned on the frame of the door to hear her confess her love and enjoyment of the other man’s touch. My friend drove around Baltimore in a daze; he went into coffee shops and sat with his head in his hands. He went into a bus station and bought a ticket to Pittsburgh but he missed his bus, sick from smoking a pack of cigarettes. Instead, he spent an hour in the bathroom vomiting yellow muck into a filthy toilet.

Our systematic theology reduces the fall of man to a technical act of betrayal. We hardly think of it as relational at all. But I think this view distorts what actually happened. I think God must have felt like my friend in Baltimore. I think it was something terribly painful for God to endure. I don’t think we can understand the pain a pure love would feel after being betrayed by the focus of its love. You wouldn’t think God would forgive them [Adam & Eve AND us] at all. You would think God would just kill them.

A few paragraphs later he goes on:

All this makes me wonder what God must have felt, arriving on the scene just after the Fall, knowing all He had made was ruined and understanding once the sacrifice that would be required to win the hearts of His children from the grasp of their seducer. I see Him in my mind walking the paths, calling to the couple meeting their eyes for the first time, and Adam and Eve shaking in absolute terror, wondering what had happened, confused at the broken promise of a snake, feeling at once the trustworthiness of their first love and wondering if God would ever love them again, feeling the hot breath of His anger and emotion, hearing Him speak for the first time, not as a friend, but as One who had been betrayed. “Who told you that you were naked?”

I think the one difference in the scenario that “Don” lays out here – is that God was not taken off guard like the man with the cheating wife. He knew it was risky to gives us freewill, and He knew what the outcome would be. What God wanted most of all was for us to be willing to love Him in spite of everything that might attempt to lure us away. We find ourselves so much of the time, in the grip of our seducer. It may be packaged in the form of food, money, sex, alcohol – but it is certainly from the enemy. It breaks the heart of the One who truly loves us. Our struggle with sin is not a tally on a scorecard, but a shameful, adulteress relationship.

"Don's MY Man!"

Several years ago, I read a book that made me rethink everything I thought to be true about being a Christian. It was Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. It was one of those kind of books that makes you think, but it is written in such an easygoing style. You can imagine each chapter as a conversation over a cup of coffee in some trendy coffee shop, or walking near the river with the author, who by the end you have become as familiar with as a friend. My daughter Kendra has also read this book – and it had a major impact on her as well. Recently I decided I was going to read it again, but when I went to get it off the bookshelf I couldn’t find it. That night at bedtime, I walked past the room and saw it in.her.hands! What transpired was not pretty - and ended with me relenting since she had already started actually reading! For the past few weeks we have been fighting over it. I keep asking her, "Are you done yet?" She like her mother often has about half a dozen books going at once, as well as the Bible, magazines and all the other reading we like to do. Today I told her I was commandeering it to read while I sat for hours with her sister at the hospital. But when I got home, in the mailbox awaited Searching for God Knows What by the same author. I forgot I had ordered it a week or so ago on Amazon. Kendra was doing a happy dance and said, she knew that meant she could have Blue Like Jazz to herself. Ugh! I want to read them both, but I guess it’s only fair I let her have it!

Everywhere I turn, I'm having to fight for my Donald Miller fix! The other night, when I went with the kids to youth group, just to sit in a corner and check it out, the young lady that was leading the study quoted some excerpts from an author with a similar style, Rob Bell’s book Velvet Elvis, which I liked but not nearly as much as Blue Like Jazz. I was distracted wondering if she had read any Donald Miller. At the end of the night, I approached her and asked if she had read Blue Like Jazz. She said, and I quote, “Don’s my man!” Now I realize that this should have made me happy - to have others reading such a great, life changing book. But shallow as I am, it made me want to talk about how much better I know “Don” than she does! How silly we can be sometimes! Good for her! And if she reaches for Don again, she’ll pull back a bloody stump! No really – it’s alright.

Even for the Likes of These - Book Review of Blue Like Jazz

I just read a book called Blue Like Jazz by a guy I never heard of named Donald Miller. One friend recommended it, and then another mentioned it in something that she was saying, and one night at the mall with a bunch of my girlfriends, amid all the hustle and bustle, somewhere in my scrambled eggs I officially called my brain, I decided I need to read something that provoked me to think. Every mall has a bookstore, so I went in search of this book with a title my eight year old thinks is weird, and the hunter in me was satisfied. Those who know me know that my library card is one of my most treasured possessions. I love used book sales and amazon.com, and have found many a gold mine at Goodwill, flea markets, yard sales and antique shops, but I NEVER, almost ever buy a book brand new. I paid full price at the mall for this book, and I will never regret it. There are so many thoughts I have had over the years that I have never been able to put in words, and Mr. Miller does says them in such an easy-going, matter-of-fact way. Here is an excerpt from a chapter about "the church" that was so right on to me.

One more thing that bugged me, then I will shut up about it. War metaphor. The churches I attended would embrace the war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.

I was nearly in tears when I read this paragraph and was convicted about the way Satan gets us sidetracked, so that we aren't even fighting the real battles. I have seen so much division between people over things that have no bearing in eternity, and I think that as long as we stay encapsulated in our little "churchianity" there is no blood, sweat and tears ministering to the world around us. We like it clean and tidy, sanitary. We don't want anything contaminated to touch our world, our minds, our children. Yes, we should be in the world and not of it. But like this author said, if we are truly to be Jesus to those in the world around us, we need to model our lives after His - He never shied away from anybody.
One thing I think can be read wrong or misinterpreted in this sampling from the book - when he says that God wants us to love hippies and liberals - I do not read this to say that we are to tolerate the sin of homosexuality, or drug use, but to look past that to the human soul that is valued, and loved by God - enough that He would send His Son to die - even for the likes of these.