Extra Reading for Being Sick
It’s kind of like that extra homework you have to catch up on when you miss several days of school…with 2 exceptions: 1. I love to read now and 2. This book is amazing!
Donald Miller has written a book that is so thought-provoking and addictive I can’t put it down right now! Kinda’ good that I started it right before I got sick so that I don’t have to put it down, huh? It’s making me think about things from a perspective I hadn’t ever considered before. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is mostly about the art of telling a story and how Donald discovered bits and pieces of it while editing what was supposed to be a movie about his life (based on his other book Blue Like Jazz). I love his ability to write just like he’s sitting across and table chatting it up with you and then “BAM,” he lays the most thought-provoking comments on ya’! I’ve had to put the book down a few times and just process what he says! Here’s a couple that have knocked my sick head to the floor:
“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”
- I put that one on the front of my journal.
“I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants…I wonder then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are just projecting their dreary lives on the rest of us.”
- See what I mean about “BAM!”
“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story,the point of life is character transformation…(Marcus) didn’t know what the point of the journey (of life) was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. and he wondered out loud if the point wasn’t the search but the transformation the search creates.
And that seemed fascinating to me.”
- Me too, Mr. Miller…me too. [side note: I love the way he said that the guy "wondered out loud." I wish I spoke like that. It makes such a mental picture of what was really happening in the conversation.]
Ok now I’ve quoted enough of the book that you already can’t wait to go pick it up! You’ll be addicted like me in no time…now I gotta’ go and finish my book! When I find some more life altering quotes within this cleverly written story I’ll let ‘cha know!
