Donald Miller's Blog, page 20

Start Life Over

Not long ago I was interviewed by The Washington Post, and as the journalist walked into my office he was taken aback. I introduced him to three of my staff members while we made our way back to my personal office. As we were sitting down to talk, he mentioned he was somewhat surprised.

“I thought you were a wandering vagabond. I mean, you don’t come off as a business guy in your books.”

I laughed.

I wasn’t sure how to explain. I said that in my heart I’m a wandering vagabond, I guess. I mean I see the world as a wide-open playground. But years ago I realized the only way to change the world was to make plans and execute them. And I really wanted to change the world. So I put together a team that I love and we wake up every day and take action.

A bi-product of being more focused and on task, I found out, was personal health. I lost weight, got better at relationships, and experienced less boredom and depression. I’m convinced human beings were not designed to stare into their belly buttons and think about life. They were designed to live life.

Back when I sat around and let life happen to me, I was sad, isolated, and way too focused on myself and my problems. I’ve no desire to go back.

The conversation got me thinking, though.

My life really has changed. I mean it’s gotten way better. I’ve written a lot of books, built a successful conference company, spun off a phenomenally successful brand strategy process, and even gotten married. So what in the world happened to me?

What I realized was there were 5 basic ideas I discovered over the years that allowed me to change. And amazingly, I’d not shared these ideas with anybody. And they’re really good. I mean, they worked for me. It’s like I got to start my life completely over.

Later this week, I’m starting a blog series on each of the 5 ideas we need to understand to start life over. Naturally, the series is called Start Life Over.

And I think you’re going to enjoy it.

I know some of you will forget, so I’ve asked our art director (Kyle) to turn it into a PDF you can download for free, right now. I don’t even want your email address. I’d just love for you to read it and experience a little bit of the changes I’ve experienced.

I’m grateful to have discovered these ideas and even more grateful they’ve worked to make my life a lot better.

Of course nothing is perfect.

But change is possible if we’re willing.

If you’re thinking “nothing is for free” you’re right. When you download the PDF, there will be an ad in the booklet for a course from my friend Michael Hyatt called 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever. But that’s all it is, just an ad. He opens it up once a year for registrations and it’s something I highly recommend. People have raved about it for years. If you really want to make serious changes this year, register for the course and take it at your own pace. It’s a great time of year to start thinking about making serious changes.

I couldn’t be more excited about the new year. We’ve got some incredible new stuff coming out. You’re going to love it. Until then, let’s start life over.

Best to you in the new year,

Donald Miller

Finding Hope When the World is Full of Unrest

I sat with forty inner-city children around a Christmas Tree. The children are part of a gang-prevention mentoring program. I sat among friends like Jacob and Jill and Tanner and Bruce and Jed and Marcus, who came to The Mentoring Project and said they wanted to help.

Photo Credit: jilblacktown, Creative Commons

Heroes like Wayland and Ashley and TG were there, police officers working behind the scenes, giving troubled kids a second chance.

Each child was called to the Christmas Tree.

There they received a personalized gift. Then, they named someone whom they would give a present.

Here were some of their gifts:

I would give my father a puppy, because he lives alone and needs someone to love him. – Carlos, 9

I would give my grandmother a younger life, so she could be around longer and love me. – Liza, 10

I would give something special to my mentor, Mrs. Michelle, because she helps me and is always by my side. – Tasha, 12

I would give a father-and-son trip to my dad, so I could spend time with him. – Tanner, 15

Each child opened his or her soul to dream.

These were pure, unfiltered, bright dreams. The light of these pure dreams warmed the room. There were beautifully awkward pauses, filled with emotion, as each child reached somewhere deep to pull out their small offering of hope.

After each child shared, they went back to their seat and were swarmed with hugs and high fives. As if the other children instinctively knew to say, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

It was beautiful. Children cried. Adults cried too.

One adult stood up and tried to speak. “I love your dreams” was all she could say, and then she was overtaken with emotion. Without hesitation, the nearest child leapt to her feet and embraced her.

“You need a hug,” the girl said.

But I came to the Christmas party torn. I sat there filled with sadness and rage over the breaking news.

I was overwhelmed by the senseless horror of it all.

I didn’t feel like being at a Christmas party, wearing an ugly sweater, drinking egg nog or opening presents. This idea of Christmas felt shallow and meaningless and insensitive and hopeless. I was losing my grip on the delicate fabric of hopeful dreams, and was becoming Langston Hughes’ “broken-winged bird.”

But I found something that night.

Something beautiful was coming from the mouths of these children: Hope. Their stories were laced with hope. Hope filled their pure-heart dreams. Hope was seen in their smiles and comforts. Hope in their potential, in their future, in their now.

Here’s what I found to be true:

The whispers of hope are louder than the gunshots of catastrophic evil. The resilience of hope blooms delicately over the ashes of bombed-out rubble. And the songs of hope hum quietly in the fragile dreams of children, against the dissonance of terrorism and insanity.

There’s hope.

We see the madness of today and hope for a better tomorrow. We don’t know exactly how to hope or how to express it. But whether we realize it or not, we all hope and wait for Hope to return. This Advent, we need him again—to restore and reconcile and bring justice and grace and peace.

This is our potent hope. That beyond us and bigger than us is a coming newness. A newness too powerful to imagine or express, a newness found in the fragile dreams of hopeful children.

This Christmas, may hope find you again.

What to Do If You’re Not Feeling The Spirit of Christmas

Juxtaposing Advent and the pre-Christmas rush sometimes makes me want to take up the mantra, “I’m religious, but not spiritual.” I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just don’t feel the spirit of Christmas and then I feel like I am missing something. During this season when it feels like waiting and watching is an extinct theological sport, such a mantra is freeing in a few ways.

So why “I’m religious, but not spiritual“?

First, it is an invitation.

An invitation to participate in all the rituals leading up to Christmas without the pressure of having to be in the spirit of Christmas at the same time. The practice of our religious disciplines in this way is enough to carry us into the season without all the stress of having to feel it at the same time.

Second, such a mantra makes us accountable for the faithfulness of our lives without having to be inspired. People can count on us to give, serve, and love, knowing that we believe religion is deeper than a feeling of spirituality.

Third, it allows us to be open freely to a deep and genuine spirituality that comes as we move through our daily lives, surprised by the spirit and not claiming it is ours. The two signs that the spirit is present is when it catches you off guard and when it is more abundant than you imagined.

This is Advent.

The season of four weeks during the longest nights of the year to prepare for the incarnation of love in the past, in the present, and in the future. It is called the season of watching and waiting, and it is set in the midst of what is also called the “Christmas Rush.” It’s the oxymoron of theology as we are called to get busy and sit still.

Advent is like the wallflower at a techno-dance party. It is the tea in a world of coffee drinkers. It is the silent prayer uttered in a Pentecostal-style worship service. It is the grief of a person in the midst of a Christmas party. Advent is the silent night between the wrapped Christmas trees glaring light.

It takes paying attention.

And it takes extraordinary religious discipline to carve out this space. But every now and again we are surprised by the spirituality of it all, where in the meandering commercial chaos we find a pathway open up and our spirits connected. This is the gift offered to us in Advent that saves the season.

In the season of Advent the readings in church take us back to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. It is the time to remember how in that chaos that the Son of God came, not as an infant, but as lead by the Spirit of God to the river to be baptized by John and begin his ministry to love the world. We begin our Christmas preparation then by remembering the prophet John.

He calls us to be religious.

Standing in the wilderness, he invites us to welcome a strange, spiritual life amid our dedicated practice of our faith. John is a deeply religious man; he has sacrificed, he fasts, he prays, he goes on retreat, and he preaches that in it all he makes a highway for God, a pathway towards our Lord.

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

Having prepared the way, Jesus comes and takes the religious practice of baptism, a rite of repentance and submission, and the heavens surprisingly open with a spirit that drives him to the wilderness and calls him to offer his life for the sake of the world.

One of my religious tasks has been to try everyday to light incense in the quiet morning of the chapel and say prayers for those who are hurting, grieving, afraid, and oppressed.

I love sitting there.

I love beholding the smoke in the grey morning light, watching it swirl in the air and fill the room. But truly many mornings it feels very religious with not much spirit in it. It is a discipline in which I go through the motions, trying to be faithful and not worrying that I am not inspired.

What I have noticed this past week is how every now and then the swirling of the incense smoke stops and the smoky prayers and incense are all of the sudden pulled in updraft. They look like they are transformed into the tail of a comet, pulling the variegated streams of grey smoke into a line that disappears into the apex of the chapel, high above the flat spirit of my life.

This week the incense transformed and looked like a ribbon tying up a gift that I almost couldn’t accept. It was, as best as I can describe it, an answered prayer that I didn’t know I was praying.

The religious act was filled with spirit.

Spirit thick like a ribbon on a kite. This is an example of the small gift of deep spirituality that you and I long for in the midst of our religion and in the midst of Advent. It is God hearing that silent prayer, like we found our peace in the midst of the night and like we felt the clouds parting for us to find our way home to God.

The gift of the spirit descending is humble, honest, and hopeful enough that it is possible to cut a pathway through being religious into the deep life of spirit.

My Advent mantra now is simply this:

Keep the faith.

Keep being faithful in your work and in your hearts and trust the spirit will come.

Keep giving drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, food to the hungry, comforting the sorrowful, tending the sick, visiting the prisoners, and burying the dead, whether or not you are always inspired to do so. It is enough to do it religiously and to trust the spirit is close by. It can be as simple as a ribbon of incense, the shadow of a passing bird, or even come in the middle of the night when you have held out little hope. Such longing is a sign that the spirit is close and that we are making a pathway towards our God.

Learning to See the Hidden Beauty of Christmas

Each Christmas I love taking a few minutes to reflect on Brian Kershisnik’s painting called “Nativity”.

It’s not your average depiction of the nativity.

The crowd of angels or saints are huddled in mass around Christ, those in front of Him pressing toward the child, but not to stop and gaze, rather to move through and beyond toward something else. It’s an evocative statement.

I think this is Kershisnik’s nod toward God in three persons, the crowd moving on to worship God, as though Christ came to point us toward the Father.

It also reminds me how nothing in God is fixed.

God is moving and active and like all of life, in motion. Healthy things grow and move and interact and it’s a stunning depiction of that reality. Notice that in the painting, many of those who have moved past Christ are singing. This is by far my favorite painting of the nativity.

Nothing in the painting is dead and everything is in motion.

And I like the expression on the face of Joseph, his hand over the eye closest to the crowd, yet uncovered toward his son. He’s bewildered. He’s moving forward in the burdensome yet awesome responsibility he’s been given in the eternal story.

He seems human, and in dilemma for having been given a child who was God, but who was also his child. I wonder in what way Joseph loved Jesus. The Child was not His own, biologically. And Joseph knew the child was from God.

I think the painter captures something special here.

And the size of Christ, smaller than a baby might be, as though to accentuate the fragility and humanity of God incarnate, nursing, dependent on the creation, all in humility.

He became man.

And also the litter of puppies at the feet of Mary, perhaps to bring out the earthy reality of birth, and further elaborate the theme of humility. Note that one pup is moving toward the Christ, while the mother is turned toward God.

And all of them are lost to the wonder of reality.

Beautiful things are happening all around them and they are bewildered and unattached.

So much of the world works that way, doesn’t it?

What a beautiful thing Christmas is. Christ has come and come as a child. God incarnate. Hope for the world. And we all move through Him into the presence of the Trinity.

• • •From the Storyline Staff:

Merry Christmas!

How Do We Know The Christmas Story Is Really True?

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a story in Kyoto, Japan, and the person I was interviewing had just received an international award for discovering the existence of exoplanets.

You know what those are, of course.

Photo Credit: Leo Hidalgo, Creative Commons

They’re planets that exist outside our solar system and orbit a star that’s a lot like our sun. I had done some reading about the topic and hoped I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself in this interview.

Astrophysics isn’t my strong suit.

It’s not the subject I lead with at cocktail parties.

In my reading about this, though, it became clear to me that the discovery of these planets was based on something other than actually seeing the planets. I had envisioned a guy peering through a telescope saying “Aha! There it is!” Instead, the focus was on the sun-like star, and the periodic changes in that star.

Something was obviously orbiting that star on a regular, predictable basis, and it was causing those changes to occur.

After the scientist and I greeted one another, the first question I asked him was, “Your discovery of this exoplanet didn’t come from your actually seeing the planet, did it?” He was very open in his response, as if I had asked him the most obvious question in the world.

“No—all of the evidence is indirect,” he said.

It reminded me of what I heard another physicist say many years ago when I watched a debate online between the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg and the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne as they discussed quarks and gluons, the smallest known particles.

I was working on a book about Polkinghorne at the time.

“We don’t believe that quarks exist because anyone has seen one,” Weinberg told the audience. “We believe that quarks exist because the theories that include them work.”

Again, indirect evidence.

Exoplanets and particles. No one has seen them. But we see their impact and conclude that they must exist.

Unseen realities. When we include them in our theories, things make more sense.

We don’t really know if God exists. We don’t really know if this Christmas story is true. We choose to put our faith in unseen realities because, when we do, things make more sense.

Why You Settle For Less When You Know There’s Better

I think we have a lot to learn from trees. I don’t say that to segue into some sort of environmentalist stand, I just think it’s true. It seems like there are few things, if any, that God hasn’t planted around us to teach us something good about who he is.

Just last week, I was listening to an episode called “Things” from my favorite podcast and there was a story about a tree that caught my attention.

In the episode, a man was sharing about a big maple tree.

His dad had planted it in the yard of the house he grew up in when they moved in. The man adored it, but sadly, years later, his dad ended up having to chop it down because it’d grown so big that it was putting the house’s foundation at risk.

At this point, the man telling the story was now an adult and living thousands of miles away from home. But when his mother called about the tree, she could sense his devastation. She then went out into the yard and gathered the remaining seeds from the maple’s removal and sent them to her son so he could start over and plant his own.

Photo Credit: Loren Kerns, Creative Commons

Right in his grown-up backyard, he watched a new maple of his own sprout up and grow to be big and beautiful.

The story continued, but I paused.

I actually physically took a break at this point in the podcast because I found myself driving and crying, which felt like a bad 80’s song. The mother’s gesture in the story seemed simple, but it struck a deep chord in me.

The idea of having to uproot something we’ve planted with sureness — to end a season that’s created memories and shade for so many years — reminded me a lot of dealing with necessary change.

We don’t like saying goodbye to things we’ve found comfort in. But sometimes, if we don’t, we end up ruining our foundation, creating bigger problems than before and never making room for anything new to take place.

The man in this story didn’t want to say goodbye to the tree that was so much a part of his past.

But with its death, he got to watch a new tree grow.

A new tree that allowed him to let go of what had been and look forward to what was ahead.

How many times have I been afraid to let go of a relationship, job or opportunity because it felt hard and I wasn’t sure if God was going to really provide something better?

I’ve been afraid to cut down trees and plant new ones.

I’ve forgotten that with every loss, I can still walk away with a handful of seeds.

What’s beautiful about this story is the seeds; they are the lessons learned and truths found that stay alive from one season to the next, if we’re willing to remove them from the remains of the rotted tree and use them to plant a new one.

But instead, we often spend more time convincing friends, family and ourselves that our old trees are fine — that our hearts, values and futures aren’t really at risk if we don’t chop them down. We find ourselves resting under a delusional shade.

We end up being the wrong kind of tree huggers.

But what if your fearful grip is ruining your foundation and keeping something better from being planted in front of you? A job you find meaning in, a significant other that adores you as much as you adore them, or the time to finally take that trip you’ve been dreaming about for years.

What tree are you holding onto that needs to be chopped down?

Time to gather the seeds and go let something better grow.

How Beautiful Things Are Built From Destruction

I never liked that old saying, the one about finding beauty from ashes.

I always thought it meant I had to see the ashes differently. I thought it meant we should look at destruction and ruin and all the things that have been flattened in our lives and find a way to call them beautiful.

Photo Credit: Leo Hidalgo, Creative Commons

Sometimes that works, but sometimes ashes are just ashes. Pretending they’re not feels like lying. I can’t do it. When I’m standing in a pile of my own ashes—my unmet expectations, my failure, my sadness, my sickness, my loneliness, my brokenness—I don’t have the strength to pretend.

But what if I misunderstood what it means?

I heard my friend Colby give a sermon about actual real-life ashes, and it changed my mind. See, there was an earthquake that shook Lisbon, Portugal on All Saints Day in 1755. The old city wasn’t built for quakes, so the buildings just crumbled. The city was flattened. Turned to ashes.

No one looked at that and called it beautiful.

No, the builders of the city looked at those ashes and decided to get rid of what was left. They cleared it all away. They took what they had learned and rebuilt, creating a stronger, more resilient city. They started from the foundation of those ashes, and they made something new and beautiful.

They didn’t pretend the disaster wasn’t disastrous. They didn’t pretend not to see it. They didn’t tell each other to carry on, to just look harder for the beauty in their half-standing homes and their crumbling streets and their hurting hearts.

They said: this is our reality.

What we had in the past didn’t work. Let’s get to work building the next thing. They built beauty right up out of the ashes.

The ashes weren’t the beautiful thing. The beautiful thing was what came next.

Beauty comes from letting go of what was, from seeing what is and then turning toward what’s next.

The Incredible Healing Power of Celebration

I love traditions. Pomp and circumstance and we-do-this-every-years of any kind are exactly my cup of tea, and I am as guilty as anyone of trying to fit about five years’ and fifteen families’ worth of such activity into twenty-five short days each December.

In the same breath, I’m aware, like we all are, that the world is a broken and difficult place. A place where need and heartache don’t let up just because it’s the time of year when we see more of Bing Crosby on cable.

When we look at the gravity of what’s going on in the world and in the lives of our friends and communities, there’s a temptation to think going to The Nutcracker or decorating a tree is shallow and silly; I can only halfway tell myself it isn’t.

Photo Credit: Leo Hidalgo, Creative Commons

But I’m starting more and more to believe that the best celebrations don’t distract us from what’s real.

They help us pay attention to it.

During the holidays, there are plenty of things (and plenty of talk about those things) that ask us to divert our attention from what matters. But there are also celebrations and traditions that point us toward each other and spur us to kindness.

The traditions we feel compelled to return to year in and year out remind us that in all of life’s unpredictability and instability, the true things don’t change. Like liturgy in a church service, these acts of celebration are a kind of agreed-upon script that provides us a way to express and wonder about and re-believe truths we hold dear.

What an incredible gift it is to have traditions.

Sending cards, breaking out the red and green food coloring for your mother-in-law’s cookie recipe, and buying your nephew a Nerf gun can be ways of saying that all evidence to the contrary, love and neighborliness and light are powerful forces in the world.

And while lifting up these positive realities is far from our only responsibility in battling the broken parts of life, I do think it’s an important one.

We need to bear witness to what’s difficult, what’s heartbreaking, what’s unjust.

We must pay attention to the people and places around us that need our help, our prayers, our resources. But let us not forget to also bear witness to what is good. To what is beautiful and true, to whatever it is that helps us see our neighbor as ourselves.

To the times when it feels like the things we hope for and do not yet see are made visible for just a quick and wonderful second.

May the traditions we keep be ways in which we choose to act out our belief that love and hope and togetherness will overcome darkness after all.

May our celebrations be moments that allow us to imagine better what a more whole world could look like.

Why You Should Get Rid of Takers in Your Life

My friend Ben, who is an accomplished photographer, told me a long time ago he got rid of the takers in his life. I’ve done the same, and it has improved my life and relationships for the better.

This is a harsh thing to talk about, because most of us think we are supposed to love and be accessible to everybody. But here’s the truth: if you were accessible to everybody, all the time, you’d be spent.

God did not design you to never say no.

Instead, He designed you with limitations.

And you have to manage those limitations well.

Photo Credit: Парки Татарстана, Creative Commons

It’s a sad fact to say there are people who are takers. They take your soul, bit by bit. They use you, they make you feel ashamed or guilty when you don’t allow them to use you, and so forth. If it’s at all possible, and by that I mean if you aren’t married to them or related and responsible in some way, these people need to go.

By letting them go, I don’t mean be mean to them or tell them they are jerks. But you can just kind of know they aren’t going to be lifelong friends and make decisions accordingly. You can get them information they need and so forth, but just know it isn’t going to be a give-and-take relationship.

I find I’m not a very good friend to the takers.

So they are better off without me anyway. They make me feel guilty, so I give to them out of compulsion, not out of love or friendship, and that doesn’t really help them much anyway.

Here is how you know if somebody is a taker:

You always feel kind of guilty around them, but on paper, you can’t figure out how you’ve hurt them.
They have been in a long line of short relationships.
They hurt people and do bad things, but it’s always somebody else’s fault.
They don’t make you feel good about yourself or your work.

Takers can change, for sure, but the only way they change is when the taking doesn’t work anymore.

And if you let them continue to take from you, you aren’t helping them change.

A Reminder For Those Who Don’t Feel They Have Enough

’Tis the season of giving. But while we assume we need to be rushing off to purchase perfect presents, we can actually do something great with what we’ve got.

Photo Credit: Flood G., Creative Commons

Take this woman and her boots for example. 

She was on the subway in New York. Another lady entered her car barefoot and evidently chilly by the way she was wiggling her pink toes. The boot-wearing woman took off her shoes and zipped them up over the pink toes.

At the warmth, the woman cried.

The now socks-wearing lady looked down at the thin layer that protected her own feet for her long trek home. A man noticed her disgruntled look and a chain reaction started. He whipped out a pair of thick gym socks and handed them to her. She could make it home. 

Hearing about the gift, a store contacted the woman who gave away her boots and sent her on a shopping spree. What did she do? Buy a new pair of boots? Enjoy the repayment for her random act of kindness?

Not exactly.

Instead, she continued the chain of giving by donating every purchase to a women’s shelter.  

After hearing this story, I realized that giving is about something deeper than the gift and my heart started growing like the Grinch in “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.”

What if Christmas,” he says, “doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!

There is a “little bit more” to this whole season than purchasing presents, isn’t there? Gifts are awesome but there are times where we can’t wrap the thing we need to give away.