Donald Miller's Blog, page 115

Time is Like Ice

The following is an excerpt from Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, released by Harvest House Publishers in 2000, and re-released by Thomas Nelson as Through Painted Deserts in 2005.

Time is like thin ice. Our days are spent living like ants in a mound, collecting our substance to survive the winter; to retire in comfortable plaid pants, blue socks, and golf shoes. All the while, the ice is melting, thin and slick. We don't notice it until struck with tragedy. We or a friend are mangled in a car wreck, and we reflect on how fragile the whole thing is. Our wives and our children become beautiful again. Our priorities change as we realize we are temporary beings. It is with this in mind that Solomon writes his book. Here is where aged couples renew their vows.

But not all of us are granted such severe mercy. Death is a difficult thing to process when no hint of it is at hand. We may never hear the ice crack. Mark Twain was right in assessing that the two elements of success are determination and ignorance. Success being the six-figure salary and ignorance being a blindness to its temporal capacity. Beyond the gravity binding us, our souls travel alone. We ascend without anchors of material possessions. We ascend empty-handed; our shells, neatly dressed in pressed suits, set snugly into caskets. The graves are all silent. The caskets are vacant. Stalin has no more wisdom for us. Nietzche is preserved in books, having forgotten to lift his casket lid and tell us he was right. Muhammad gives us the slip. So does Buddha. It is Christ alone who defeats the grave. He came back from death. Nothing left in the tomb but echoes and cobwebs. And so we do well to listen to Him with the ears of dying men.

Time is Like Ice is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

The Dawn of a New Era

Please don't tell Thomas Kinkade we're using this image.

Hello! Let me state up front this is not Donald Miller. This may be confusing for many of you. Please bear with me.

If you've ever written a blog — and I'm sure the vast majority of you have — you know it's a bit of work. You need to have interesting thoughts, and then you have to type them on a computer, and then you have to do an image search for a witty picture…it's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it's tough to maintain constant production. Now, imagine you're Don, and you write books for a living, so every sentence you punch into WordPress is potentially a sentence you don't put in a book. Now imagine you are a cactus wearing a cowboy hat! See? Imagination can be fun.

Anyway, Don asked me recently if I'd like to cover a couple blog posts for him every week, and I agreed because I like helping out where I can.

Hi, I'm Jordan Green. You may remember me from such things as "Don's roommate in Million Miles in a Thousand Years", or as the guy who runs this site. I am NOT the 3-star shooting guard prospect who signed with Texas A&M, though I have similar hops. A few more things about me:

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and lived with Don for about three years. Then, three years ago, I got married and promptly moved to Phoenix, Arizona. I will likely move back to Portland in nine months, give or take. As a native Portlander, I fervently support the Trail Blazers, the Oregon Ducks, and the Timbers.
I have a two year-old daughter named Lana, who is absurdly adorable.
I have worn Chaco sandals almost exclusively for the last seven years, even in the winter in Oregon.
I write a weekly television column for the Tucson Weekly, and co-wrote a book titled Besides the Bible , which has sold well over 2.3 million copies.*
I am right-handed.

Please! Do not flee! Hear me out!

Here's how this will work: on certain days, I will be posting content. This content may be in the form of excerpts from Don's books. It might be accounts of people living out positive story elements in their lives. It may be recipes for Argentine grilled tri-tip (seriously, that chimichurri sauce is AMAZING). My favorite part, though, is we will also feature guest posts from a wide variety of writers, some of whom you will know! Will Stephen King be one of them? Barbara Kingsolver? Unpublished works from David Foster Wallace? No. Sorry to get your hopes up about that.

If you're fists are balled as you stamp your feet and cry, "NO! I ONLY WANT TO READ DON'S BLOG POSTS!", that's fine. Just avoid this place on the days we have guests. Problem: solved. Also, I would hate to see how you react in the face of real adversity.

One more thing: my opinions do not necessarily reflect the far more thoughtful and well-articulated opinions of this blog's owner. I really am honored to have a chance to write for you all. Let the great experiment begin!

* – Actual sales numbers not verified.

The Dawn of a New Era is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Intimacy with God Comes When we Accept His Kindness

Each work morning I read a bit of the Bible. I don't study it, I just read it. It's my morning coffee and conversation with a power greater than myself. It centers me and without it I think I'd be distracted at work, distracted by a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter. This morning I was reading through Psalm 7. There's a humble thought in the Psalm where David asks God to "trample his life to the ground and lay his soul in the dust" if he has ever screwed over a friend or an ally.

David was a dramatic guy. He was a passionate leader, or at least a passionate writer (something tells me he was a bit more sober in person as passion inspires but leadership needs to be measured). Regardless, the thought occurred to me that we often need to pray against ourselves.

I was taking communion a few weeks ago in Nashville, at one of my favorite churches. My friend Jim Chaffee happened to be delivering communion that day and as I stood in line to go forward, I prayed about what to pray. Literally, I asked God what He wanted me to say to Him as I took communion. I don't normally do this, but I thought it would be a fun way to connect with God, to just talk to Him during the process as opposed to only remembering Him.

Anyway, what came to my mind was just a simple phrase: "Christ, defeat me with your goodness." I liked the phrase because it meant God was good and I was not, and yet He would not defeat me with His anger or His wrath, but His kindness, His grace and His goodness. I like to think the phrase came from God, but that's not provable. We do know God's kindness brings us to repentance, though.

Another truth in that statement is there are very real desires in me and real ambitions that are not good. Some of the actions that stem from my personality are selfish, and damaging to others. They are manipulative and lack truth and so stifle relationships. These characteristics must be defeated because God wants His family to be close, and so each of us must be defeated by God, by God's kindness. His kindness endears me to a personal commitment to tell the truth, into the thrill and humiliation and generosity of that very risky place where we walk into the world saying "I'm not too much and I'm not too little but this is who I am" and also that "there but for the grace of God go I."

So here we are, temporary beings, with little to do but navigate our days in truth and humility. Perhaps it not the bigness of our personalities, but our smallness, our selves being defeated that will change the little bit of world God has appointed to us for caretaking. We connect with God when we ask Him to defeat in us all the ways in which He cannot connect, all the untruth and games and manipulation and we come to Him finally saying, okay, I get it, you really are good, defeat in me the lack of faith, let your goodness rid me of the stuff that doesn't connect with you or the world around me.

Intimacy with God Comes When we Accept His Kindness is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

How Should we use Intuition in Decision Making?

I make a lot of decisions using intuition, which researchers are beginning to understand as more reliable, and less mystical than previously thought. Intuition is really about pattern recognition, about subconsciously picking up on conflicting patterns in a situation. One of the more discussed examples of intuitive decision making has to do with a fire chief who, shortly after entering a burning house, commanded all his men leave the house immediately without really understanding why. He said the decision came from his gut, that "something wasn't right" and he wanted his men out of the house.

That decision saved the lives of his men, as seconds after exiting the house the floor collapsed. If they'd have stayed in the house, everybody would have been killed.

When interviewed about his decision, the fire chief couldn't explain his decision logically. Some of the men under his command attributed the command to a higher force, a sort of guardian angel. But guardian angel or not, by design our brains work to protect us from making mistakes, and often we have no explanation as to why.

On further investigation, several things were happening in that fire that worked to inform the fire chief's subconscious. The first was that the firemen already on the seen had been pouring water into the kitchen, where the fire was supposedly focussed. With a normal fire, this would have solved the problem and put out the fire. But in this case, no amount of water helped. The second oddity that fed the fire chief's subconscious is that the fire was unusually quiet. Fires normally rage and they are loud. But when entering the house, the fire wasn't making a sound that aligned with what the fire chief was seeing.

Without knowing it, the chief subconsciously understood something really basic, and that's that he didn't understand what was happening. And because he didn't understand, he knew his men could be in danger. By commanding the evacuation, he was pulling his men from a situation in which he did not know how to guide them, protect them, or solve the problem of the fire.

What was really happening in the house was that the fire was not in the kitchen, it was just burning up through the kitchen. The fire was actually raging in the basement, burning the underside of the wood floors. This would not be understood until later.

All this to say, as leaders, intuition matters. But we should also understand, perhaps in hindsight, why we are feeling cautious about a situation. Here are some tips on better using intuition:

1. When something seems wrong, back off and use caution.

2. Look for conflicts in patterns. If you're wanting to hire somebody but they've been through three jobs in the last two years, there is a pattern conflict. A person who is dependable and productive should be able to keep a job longer than a few months. Inquire as to why their pattern is in conflict with their ambition to hold a job.

3. If you suspect something is amiss in a situation, don't interrogate whoever you suspect too soon. Wait and watch and try to understand why your intuition is sending alarm signals. Once you identify some problems in patterns, sit down with the person you're dealing with and ask them to explain the pattern conflicts.

How about you? How do you use intuition in your decision making process?

How Should we use Intuition in Decision Making? is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Review: Katie Herzig and The Waking Sleep

I met Katie Herzig years ago before I'd heard her music. She was a critics favorite, floating around Nashville but like so many musicians floating around Nashville she was, for me, lost in a sea of names and talent. We met at a retreat and like everybody who meets Katie I had my crush (Supposedlyit's a right of passage in Nashville) and yet what came out of that for me was a sincere appreciation for her music. She's since become a friend but honestly I consider myself more a fan, still.

It's arguable, but I think you could make a case for Katie being one of the greatest singer/songwriters alive. Occasionally she attempts a pop feel and while it works and works better than most other artists doing pop those songs often strike me as less than what she's capable of as an artist, as though she's torn between doing her music and doing music that she knows will land with a larger group of fans. These songs (though not sonically) remind me of that old Blues Traveler song "Hook" in which John Popper wrote a song with an incredible hook that rose to and stayed at the top of the charts for months, but upon listening closely you realize he's making fun of the listener, saying all you really care about is this "hook" and you don't even realize I'm making fun of you.

Katie isn't making fun of anybody with her pop stuff, though. She means it, I believe. Songs like "Free my Mind" remind me of her song "Hallogram" in which she seems to be singing about the complications of games within relationships. Who doesn't understand that and who doesn't mean it when they talk about it? And yet for me Katie seems smarter than those kinds of conversations. You'll love those songs, as do I, but when you hear the other stuff you realize she's an artist set apart.

Her genius, and I do mean genius, is when her music goes into your subconscious and pulls something from deeper in the well, a bunch of stuff you didn't know was in you. Track two, "Make a Noise", which talks about being born before the war, hails back to a desire for peace theologians might call Eden or psychologists think of as womb thinking, or Joseph Campbell might dismiss as metaphor that has given birth to a thousand myths. Regardless, we all get it and we all want it and it's nice to not feel alone in the longing. Katie's best music has this quality, the quality that lets you know you're not alone.

With "Way to the Future" Katie stays just above or beyond or "better than" pop. It's not as in your face as Feist and so you don't get tired of it as quick. And it's lovely and slightly seductive in a harmless kind of teasing which is what good pop music does. "Best Day of Your Life" may be the catchiest song on the new record and manages a hopeful call to appreciate all you've been given and all you get to do.

Where Katie steps toward genius is  with songs like "Wasting Time" where she plays with pop. Once again a song about relationships, she talks about how "it's easier wasting time than breaking hearts you love" in which seems to sing somewhat happily, yet reflectively, about how frustrating it is to be wanted and yet not really want back. It's a kind of playful yet truly humble "I'm sorry." Or at least that's how I heard it, and perhaps half the guys in Nashville heard it this way too.

Where Katie moves fully into genius is with two songs, the first of which is the title track "The Waking Sleep." It's made for movie stuff, lots of ethereal sound  producer Cason Cooley floats beneath her as she sings about rising again.

In my opinion, the song where Katie transcends is with "Lost and Found." Cason floats more sound beneath her, but a beat moves it forward and a subtle build in the chorus makes the song an anthem. She sings of every war being another seed that could feed every soul in need and the song seems to pine for something other than what we know and hopes for something more, something beyond.

This song, especially, hit me hard. I don't even know why. I think at least twice I'd had a couple beers and texted Katie thanking her for the song. She was always kind enough to text a "thank you" back.

Not all the music on The Waking Sleep makes sense to me, but neither does the moon. I think this album will be like that for all of us. We will listen to it a hundred times and love it, then find it again a year from now or two years from now and remember it the way we see the moon and wonder if maybe there's more out there than what we know, and hope whatever it is that is out there good. What more could we ask for from an artist than to make a moon.

Review: Katie Herzig and The Waking Sleep is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

A Reminder that Beauty Comes from Pain

My dear friends Jesse and Brianne Olson e-mailed me a picture of their daughter this morning. She's beautiful of course, and strong and smart just like her parents and her name is Payson.

What got me all choked up, though, was her name. I knew immediately where the name came from. I was there when the name Payson was born, sort of. It was a few years ago and we were all riding our bikes across America. We'd been in the desert for a week, riding through temperatures as high as 112 degrees.

The day we rode out of Phoenix was one of the hardest days of the trip. We rode over mountains and then more mountains. Every range we climbed revealed another range. Our hearts sank each time we topped a massive, hours-long climb. We slept in a rock quary for rest, literally flat on our backs on piles of rocks. We drank gallons of water but never quenched our thirst, and our stopping place was hours and hours away. The ride was so tough a friend and I actually got off our bikes and walked the last few miles, our tires flat from punctured tubes. We walked into town long after sunset. But we made it.

Jesse and Brianne were riding a tandem. No kidding, they rode together, as a married couple, all the way across America. These people are not small on perseverance, and Jesse is one of the toughest men I've ever met.

So Payson, their first child's name, came from a day when they decided not to quit. They decided that no matter what challenge lay in front of them, they were a team and they'd live together and die together.

Here's the e-mail they sent. I hope you find it inspiring, and I hope it helps you remember no matter what you're going through, that pain creates beauty. Keep pedaling.

So here it is… the story you've all been waiting for. I'm sorry it has taken so long to get it posted. I wanted to be able to sit down for a minute & give a good explanation.

Yes, Payson is named after Payson, Arizona.

You may recall the ride…

It had to be about 115 degrees out, the mileage was probably around 90 for the day, and there was no shade, not a shadow… (You may recall our lunch break & nap in the rock quarry that Greg calmly ended with his assessment, "Y'all know this is prime rattle snake territory don't ya?")

The ride to Payson was NOT for the faint of heart. I struggled all day "thinking" that my breaking point was sooner than it actually was…

Some of you may remember me getting in the van, expecting to have Jesse join me… Well… "Manimal" went on riding the tandem ALONE! That is one of the more heart breaking images I can picture these days; seeing my husband push through and do something alone that we were supposed to be working at together.

I got back on the tandem the first chance we had to pull off & finished the day out. I feel like that was the day we learned to ride as a team. 

I also will never forget feeling that Payson was the most refreshing end to a ride that we experienced the whole tour. The air was crisp & cool. It was the first time we smelled PINE TREES! 

So essentially, our daughter is named after a journey where we pushed through & learned to work as a team, where we learned the truth about ourselves & I like to think of her name meaning something like, "Refreshing." 

Her middle name is Grace. It's not meant to refer to the Grace of Payson. It's a separate idea all together about hidden strength. People tend to think of Grace & associate it with Ballerinas. I think of Grace & think of the difference of living by the law vs. living by Grace. Living by Grace is SO MUCH HARDER. It takes so much more wisdom and strength. So there you have it. Payson Grace Olson. She's our daughter. We're excited to see what God does through this precious girl & are so glad that you are all a part of the memory she is named after.

Welcome to the world, Payson. Welcome to the beauty God has made. May you have adventures of your own, and a community to get you through, and something beautiful at the end of your journey that you could have never expected. We've been waiting for you. We love you.

 

A Reminder that Beauty Comes from Pain is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Leaders Lead People Through the Fear

I received an email last night from a courageous friend named Paul. He's one of those tough guys but his toughness isn't covering anything. He's tough on the outside and tough on the inside, too. What I mean by tough on the outside is he's actually training to run one-hundred miles in a single go only two weeks from now. No kidding, he'll run the Chicago marathon as the last quarter of his personal challenge. He's insane. He's doing it to help some children he loves. I'll give you more information below.

And yet, whenever I exchange stories with my friend he's got more to talk about on the inside journey than he does about his athletic accomplishments. He talks about very hard emotional stuff as though it's a challenge equal to the physical. Whether it's addressing a father wound, or addressing his desire to love people more deeply, they're all challenges, they're all mountains to climb and he does it with both fear and enthusiasm.

Still, there's times when it's hard to be that kind of guy. I think one of the reasons it's hard is because facing challenges head on is a lonely business. I truly believe most people in the world avoid conflict. We either numb ourselves by getting validation somewhere or numb ourselves by drinking or eating or so many other coping mechanisms.

I reminded my friend in an e-mail this morning that sometimes leading just means being out front, going to the places very few people are willing to go. But the cool thing about leaders is they show the rest of us that the path is scary but ultimately safe.

As I e-mailed him, I thought about the few times I've gone through haunted houses with friends. For whatever reason, I sometimes feel like I need to be the guy out front. You know, the guy turning the corners first, feeling the walls, trying to find my way through the maze in the dark. But I assure you, I'm not feeling all that brave up there. I'm feeling terrified, to tell you the truth.

Leading is like that sometimes. You've got a gaggle of screaming, giggling friends behind you, afraid of their demons, afraid of addressing their wounds, afraid of getting real about their coping mechanisms, and they're looking for a shirt to cling to, somebody to bump into when the line suddenly stops because a guy just jumped out of a closet with a chain saw. They're looking for somebody to scream with and to grab them and keep them from falling down. They're looking for somebody to move them quickly through the room they're in into the next room, the one that holds yet another challenge.

To those of you who lead, I'll tell you what I'm telling myself these days, and it's the same thing I told my friend.

The trick to leading a group through a haunted house is knowing the scary stuff can't actually kill you. The management won't let them.

It's the same with all the scary stuff we have to deal with, all the fear of abandonment and loneliness and wounds we have to address. They aren't allowed to kill us. Sure we might feel some fear, and a lot of it. But in the end (even if it kills our earthly bodies) we don't die. We just come through the other side with a knowledge we faced our fears, and we got out of that haunted house alive, our screaming and giggling friends in tow.

If you're a leader, just know you're supposed to be a little afraid. And you're supposed to be taking some people with you. And nobody can actually kill you in this thing. All they can do is yell boo. Be brave.

* You can read more about my friend Paul Jansen VanRensburg and what three of his friends are doing, and why they're doing it Go Paul, Michael, Hannah and Rusty!

Leaders Lead People Through the Fear is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

The Best Writing Advice I've Ever Received

I've a shelf at home devoted to books about writing. I'd say I might even have two shelves devoted to those books now. I've read most of them and some are better than others. But the best writing advice I've ever received didn't come from a book. It actually occurred to me one morning when I was lying in bed, not wanting to get up and do my job. Maybe it came from heaven, I don't know. But the advice was this: Love your reader.

It sounds simple, but it isn't so easy, actually.

Writing is something most of us do alone. We might collaborate on a screenplay or something, but with a book or a blog, we are alone in front of our computers, tapping out our thoughts. It's not like the reader is sitting behind us, looking over our shoulder making comments. We're pretty disconnected from whoever it might be who will ultimately be benefited by our work. For this reason, it's hard to remember that, well, people will actually be benefited by our work.

Add to this, most writers don't think there work really matters. I've met writers who have sold thousands of books and still don't think anybody's life has been changed by their efforts. There's an enemy whispering in their ear, I think.

I wrote four books and sold millions before I realized I was helping anybody. Sure I knew people were reading my stuff, but I didn't realize they were making better decisions because we'd sat down for a few hours and I shared my heart.

But these days, that's about all that's keeping me going. Just the thought that somebody out there might not leave their spouse, or quit on that book they're writing, or change their career or find God. In all those books about writing filled with tips and tricks, I think loving the reader is the best motivator I've found. And it keeps the quality up, too. We do tend to put our best foot forward when we care about somebody.

So the next time you sit down to write a blog, just remember somebody is going to read it and be encouraged.

 

The Best Writing Advice I've Ever Received is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

What to do with Pain

The older I get, the more I appreciate pain. I'm not a masochist by any stretch because I don't like pain any more than the average person. And yet I've come to appreciate it.

In years past, when I'd go through a hard time, I'd run from it. I'd try not to feel it or deal with it. But these days, I've learned the only way life can actually get better is if I face reality, face my mistakes and liabilities and somehow correct or at least acknowledge them.

In stories, characters only change in crisis. Characters never, ever change when the story is going well. And of course the same is true with life. Pain is always an invitation to grow.

Sadly, pain also has the opposite affect. If we cover over our pain with coping mechanisms, it's as though we are going through a workout without gaining muscle. Some people do this for years and never grow. Ever met a 50-year old who is still making the mistakes of a 19-year old? It's likely because he never accepted pain and allowed it to change his character.

Here are some ways we can grow through when we are in the midst of pain:

1. Accept it: We need to sit with the pain and not run from it. This means we can't drink it away or make ourselves busy or "start the next chapter" before we've wrapped up the previous one.

2. Gain perspective: If we lose a loved one, it likely has nothing to do with us. And yet, we can still ask ourselves what really matters in the face of our pain. We can ask ourselves how we want to live differently because of the pain.

3. Take inventory: There are other kinds of pain, though, that bring us into self reflection. We'd be wise, then, to do some self reflecting. If the pain is relational, I'd encourage going through Henry Cloud and John Townsend's book "Safe People" and making an inventory of how you are unsafe. This inventory may help you reorganize your life so you don't find yourself in the same situation again.

In stories and in life, pain is our friend. It's an unwelcome friend, but a friend nonetheless. The good news is if we make friends with our pain, it won't stay long and it will leave us with a gift. But if we avoid pain, it will chase us down until we finally accept the gift it has to offer.

What to do with Pain is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog

Remembering John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Today in 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien passed. He was a philologist, a student and professor of language, and indeed created something like his own language, and his own world, the adventures within which are chronicled in his fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and Simarillion.

He was raised by his mother as his father died when he was young. Born in South Africa but he moved to England as a child and stayed when his father died. His mother taught him botany and languages including Latin, which the child enjoyed. He could read by the age of four, and began writing shortly thereafter. He was raised with the help of his grandparents, who were Baptists, but when his mother became Catholic, the family stopped all financial assistance to her and the children and essentially disowned the young man. His mother died of diabetes when the young writer was only twelve. She left him to be cared for by the church, specifically Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, in the shadow of church towers and in the presence of medievalist paintings all of which seem to have influenced his work.

He married the sweetheart of his youth, another orphan named Edith Mary whom he met at sixteen. He was forbid to see her because she was a protestant. He obeyed his guardian, but when he turned twenty-one, and was set free to pursue her, he wrote her and declared his live. She was engaged to another man, but had agreed to marry the man because she believed he had forgotten her. He assured her he hadn't, and she returned her fiance's ring. The two were married and produced four children. They are buried together in Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford.

He was a staunch catholic his entire life. He disdained the industrialized age, including cars. He rode a bike all his life. He was friends with C.S. Lewis but did not like that the writer overtly used religious allegory. His own religious imagery was simply that of fantasy, which he claimed borrowed from reality, which he also claimed was Christianity and therefore had Christian themes.

He, made in the image of God, was a creator of worlds.

An interview with Tolkien:

Remembering John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog