Beach Reading - "A Million Miles in A Thousand Years" by Donald Miller

If you hang around here long you're going to find that one of my favorite contemporary thinkers and authors is a guy named Donald Miller. He wrote this pretty amazing book called "Blue Like Jazz" that rather revolutionized my thinking a couple of years back. He's done so again with his newest book, "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years".

I heard Donald speak almost exactly a year ago, he was working on this project at the time. I remember wishing desperately that the book was already in print because the way he spoke of life as story resonated so strongly to me as a writer. It is FINALLY done and on the shelves and it does NOT disappoint.

I brought it with me to the beach as a beach read. I read it through the first day we arrived and then I spent half of the evening and today underlining the things that my spirit went "YES!" to as I read it the first time. I don't want to share too many excerpts but so much of what he said hit me right where I live. From the authors note at the very beginning of the book to the afterword at the end this book spoke to my soul.

On page 59 in the middle of the page there is this quote:

If I have a hope, its that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

With the exception of gender, this passage applies directly to me:

"I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be(fe)male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are charcters in books.

You can call it God or a conscience you can dismiss it as that intutive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness."

Those who know the details of my real life this year will understand why I found this quote so incredibly comforting.

"The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed into its former place. You are not who you were in February."

I am still absorbing it all. I highly recommend it though. Its on sale for just under $12 at Family Christian Stores. Go get it.