A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

by Donald Miller

if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.

and if you’ve had a couple of drinks, they have a sentimental quality that gets you believing we are all poems coming out of the mud.

The movies I like best are the slow literary movies that don’t seem to be about anything and yet are about everything at the same time.

He watched the snow as though there were writing on each flake and he was trying to read. He watched each flake as if it were the only one, and they all fell like feathers.

The lights of the city float on the surface of the river, and you paddle through their reflections like lily-pads.

but then his forehead wrinkled like a father about to explain sex.

I make self-deprecating comments (like a dog that pees when you walk in the room).

Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in.

The fact of life and the reality of death give the human story its dramatic tension.

we dig a hole and put the body in the hole and cover the casket with all our questions.

while people were certainly sad, there was also a sense we were burying a good man, which feels different than burying an average man.

because people can’t live without a story, without a role to play.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

But I also wondered if he wasn’t right, that we were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The point of a story is the character arc, the change.

At the heart of his humanity, what will we find? Is he loving or cruel? Generous or selfish? Strong or weak? Truthful or a liar? Courageous or cowardly? The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure, to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.”

God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from his mouth, all the wet of the world his spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be 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 characters in books.

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.

“You put something on the page,” he said. “Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”

joy costs pain.

But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

He opened the door and smiled with my smile

I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are

thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water.

I only say this about the children because I used to believe charming people were charming because they were charming, or confident people were confident because they were confident. But all this is, of course, circular. The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.

“You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.”

I ordered a ring, and we started premarital counseling and enjoyed the natural high the body creates to trick us into thinking another human being might rescue us,

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

We sat in silence and creaked in our chairs as James and Jena recited their vows, and our minds went up like high branches over them and over each other.

We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status.

seemed to enjoy putting the characters in her life together, as though fleshing out lesser-known scenes in her narrative.

A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.

Sometimes, when I’m writing stories, it feels this way. I mean, when I’m sitting at the computer like I am now, I lose track of time and feel as though I’m jumping through the water in the creek, while God is sitting on the shore, pleased at my pleasure.