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I Think Writers Would Do Better To Consider That Idea [to Write To Yourself], Because You Know Yourself Really Well, And You Never Know Your Demographic Fully. You Only Get Into Trouble If You Try To Please Somebody You Don't Really Understand.

-Donald Miller

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I Think Writers Would

Donald Miller

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I Think Writers Would Do Better To Consider That Idea [to Write To Yourself], Because You Know Yourself Really Well, And You Never Know Your Demographic Fully. You Only Get Into Trouble If You Try To Please Somebody You Don't Really Understand.

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I Don't Find Anyone More Noble Than Jesus.

People Are Lonely. They Want Company And Your Book Can Provide Them Company And A Little Bit Of Hope. And There's Nothing Wrong With That.

I Always Thought The Bible Was More Of A Salad Thing, You Know, But It Isn't. It's A Chocolate Thing.

I Love To Give To Charity, But I Don't Want To Be Charity. This Is Why I Have So Much Trouble With Grace.

I Think The Things We Want Most In Life, The Things We Think Will Set Us Free, Are Not The Thing We Need.

If I Use The Bible To Prove I Am Right, I Have Yet To Be Humbled By The Beautiful Truths Of The Bible.

I Tend To Write First Drafts That Are Incredibly Cognitive, Very Rational, Very Boring. They Come Off As Justification. Like, 'this Is My Idea And Here's All The Reasons That It's Right.' It Doesn't Make For Very Compelling Reading.

I Used Love Like Money, But Love Doesn't Work Like Money. It Is Not A Commodity. When We Barter With It, We All Lose. When The Church Does Not Love It's Enemies, It Fuels Their Rage. It Makes Them Hate Us More.

Today I Wonder Why It Is God Refers To Himself As 'father' At All. This, To Me, In Light Of The Earthly Representation Of The Role, Seems A Marketing Mistake.

I Think Jesus Is Saying, Look, You Guys Are Running Around Like Monkeys Trying To Get People To Clap, But People Are Fallen, They Are Separated From God, So They Have No Idea What Is Good Or Bad, Worthy To Be Judged Or Set Free, Beautiful Or Ugly To Begin With. Why Not Get Your Glory From God? Why Not Accept Your Feelings Of Redemption Because Of His Pleasure In You, Not The Fickle And Empty Favor Of Man? And Only Then Will You Know Who You Are, And Only Then Will You Have True, Uninhibited Relationships With Others.

Sometimes I Wish I Could Go Back In Time, Sit Down With Myself And Explain That Things Were Going To Be Okay, That Everybody Loses Ground Sometimes And It Doesn’t Mean Anything. It’s The Way Life Works. This Is Hard To Understand In The Moment. You Get To Thinking About The Girl Who Rejected You, The Job You Got Fired From, The Test You Failed, And You Lose Sight Of The Big Picture — The Fact That Life Has A Beautiful Way Of Remaking Itself Every Few Weeks.

Meaning Is Something We Experience More Than We Attain. It's Like Finding A Nice, Easy Current In A River That Carries You Through Life.

Let's Show Up To Life. Let's Prove How Beautiful It Can Really Be. Let's Face The Conflict, Redeem It, Conquer It, And Allow It To Mold Our Character. Let's Participate In What God Is Doing In The World.

Christians Might Say That You Can't Live A More Meaningful Life Without Jesus. Well, That's Absolutely Not True. You Can. You Can Enjoy A Sunrise Whether You Know Jesus Or Not.

I Never Liked Jazz Music Because Jazz Music Doesn't Resolve. But I Was Outside The Bagdad Theater In Portland One Night When I Saw A Man Playing The Saxophone. I Stood There For Fifteen Minutes, And He Never Opened His Eyes.

I Had Some Friends Commenting Me Books, But Mostly It Was People I Didn't Know. But They're Fans. They're Fans Of The Books, So They Have A Working Knowledge Of How I Write, And They Know What They Like And What They Don't Like. I'm Really Grateful For Their Feedback.

Be Encouraged. Your Heart Is Writing A Poem On The World And It's Being Turned Into A Thousand Songs.

Sunday Morning Church Service Is Not An Enormous Priority; Spending Time With Other Believers Is.

The Mountains Themselves Call Us Into Greater Stories.

If What You Are Doing Is Important, You Will Encounter Resistance. If What You Are Doing Isn't Important It Will Be Easy.

I Want To Keep Walking Away From The Person I Was A Moment Ago, Because A Mind Was Made Fo Figure Things Out, Not To Read The Same Page Recurrently.

At The Time, I Didn't Know What Forgiveness Meant. I Wouldn't Really Know What Forgiveness Meant For Another Year, Until My Pastor, Rick Mckinley, Happened To Spell It Out In A Sermon. He Said That When You Forgive, You Bear The Burden Somebody Has Given You Without Holding Them Accountable.

There's A Genius Part Of You That Wants To Create. That Part Of You Wants To Talk To God. Get Out Of The Way.

It Is Hard For Us To Admit We Have A Sin Nature Because We Live In This System Of Checks And Balances. If We Get Caught, We Will Be Punished. But That Doesn't Make Us Good People; It Only Makes Us Subdued. Just Think About The Congress And Senate And Even The President. The Genius Of The American System Is Not Freedom; The Genius Of The American System Is Checks And Balances. Nobody Gets All The Power. Everybody Is Watching Everybody Else. It Is As If The Founding Fathers Knew, Intrinsically, That The Soul Of Man, Unwatched, Is Perverse.

Lets Choose To Do Something Really Difficult, Something That Saves Lives, And Let's Do That Thing With People We Love.

When You Stop Expecting People To Be Perfect, You Can Like Them For Who They Are. And When You Stop Expecting Material Possessions To Complete You, You'd Be Surprised At How Much Pleasure You Get In Material Possessions. And When You Stop Expecting God To End All Your Troubles, You'd Be Surprised How Much You Like Spending Time With God.

I Am Early In My Story, But I Believe I Will Stretch Out Into Eternity, And In Heaven I Will Reflect Upon These Early Days, These Days When It Seemed God Was Down A Dirt Road, Walking Toward Me. Years Ago He Was A Swinging Speck In The Distance; Now He Is Close Enough I Can Hear His Singing. Soon I Will See The Lines On His Face.

People Love To Have Lived A Great Story, But Few People Like The Work It Takes To Make It Happen.

The Times In My Life When I Have Been Most Happy Haven't Been The Times When I Have Had The Most Money Or The Most Freedom Or The Most Anything, But Rather When I've Been In Love Or In Community Or Right With People.

Even Our Beliefs Have Become Trend Statements.

It Occurs To Me It Is Not So Much The Aim Of The Devil To Lure Me With Evil As It Is To Preoccupy Me With The Meaningless.

I Had Always Suspected Language Was Quite Limited In Its Ability To Communicate The Intricate Mysteries Of Truth.

Ability To Communicate

Flattery Has A Short Battery Life, But Reminding People They Are Amazing And Precious And Wanted And Works Of Art Can Truly Change Their Lives.

If You Have A Beautiful Story, It Has To Have Conflict. If You Don't Have Conflict, It Can't Be A Good Story.

I Never Liked Jazz Music Because Jazz Music Doesn't Resolve. But I Was Outside The Bagdad Theater In Portland One Night When I Saw A Man Playing The Saxophone. I Stood There For Fifteen Minutes, And He Never Opened His Eyes. After That I Liked Jazz Music. Sometimes You Have To Watch Somebody Love Something Before You Can Love It Yourself. It Is As If They Are Showing You The Way. I Used To Not Like God Because God Didn't Resolve. But That Was Before Any Of This Happened.

Your Life Is A Blank Page. You Write On It.

When We Talk About The Decline Of The American Family, I Think We Have To Go Back To The Industrial Revolution.

If I Have A Hope, It's 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.”

I Don't Read A Lot Of Inspirational Books For Life. But For Writing, I Think The Two Best Books Are The War Of Art And William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I Read A Lot Of Classics.

When I Was In Love There Was Somebody In The World Who Was More Important Than Me, And That, Given All That Happened At The Fall Of Man, Is A Miracle, Like Something God Forgot To Curse.

Being A Christian Is More Like Falling In Love Than Understanding A Series Of Ideas.

Falling In Love

I Heard Once That Real Love Doesn't Ask What Is In It For Me; It Just Gives Unconditionally. It Just Tries To Take The Weight Out Of Somebody Else's Pack, Lessen His Load, And If It Gets Reciprocated, That's Great, But That Isn't What You Did It For.

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.

The Heart Responds To The Conflict Within A Story.

It Was A Haunting Feeling, The Sort Of Sensation You Get When You Wonder Whether You Are Two People, The Other Of Which Does Things You Can't Explain, Bad And Terrible Things.

The Times We Worked Harder To Make The Day Stand Out. Our Story Demanded That We Change And So We Did.

Sometimes The Things We Want Most In Life Are The Things That Will Kill Us.

Meaningful Stories Have Lots And Lots Of Conflict. If We Avoid Conflict, Our Stories Won't Be Meaningful.

We Have To Have Positive Male Role Models.

You Never Question The Truth Of Something Until You Have To Explain It To A Skeptic.

We Don't Think Much About How Our Love Stories Will Affect The World, But They Do. Children Learn What's Worth Living For And What's Worth Dying For By The Stories They Watch Us Live. I Want To Teach Our Children How To Get Scary Close, And More, How To Be Brave. I Want To Teach Them That Love Is Worth What It Costs.

The Most Difficult Lie I Have Ever Contended With Is This: Life Is A Story About Me.

As A Human, I Am Flawed In That It Is Difficult For Me To Consider Others Before Myself. It Feels Like I Have To Fight Against This Force, This Current Within Me That, More Often Than Not, Wants To Avoid Serious Issues And Please Myself, Buy Things For Myself, Feed Myself, Entertain Myself, And All Of That.

No Love Is Conditional. If Love Is Conditional, It’s Just Some Sort Of Manipulation Masquerading As Love.

What We Really Need Is Somebody Who Loves Us So Much We Don’t Worry About Death, Or About [anything For That Matter]… We Need This; We Need This So We Can Love Other People Purely And Not For Selfish Gain, We Need This So We Can See Everybody As Equals, We Need This So Our Relationships Can Be Sincere, We Need This So We Can Stop Kicking Ourselves Around, We Need This So We Can Lose All Self-awareness And Find Ourselves For The First Time, Not By Realizing Some Dream, But By Being Told Who We Are By The Only Being Who Has The Authority To Know, By That I Mean The Creator.

Leave. Roll The World Around On Your Tongue For A Bit. It Is A Beautiful World, Isn't It? So Strong And Forceful, The Way You Have Always Wanted To Be. And You Will Not Be Alone. You Have Never Been Alone. Don't Worry. Everything Will Still Be Here When You Get Back. It Is You Who Will Have Changed.

Much Of The Time I’ve Spent Trying To Impress People Has Been A Waste. The Reality Is People Are Impressed With All Kinds Of Things: Intelligence, Power, Money, Charm, Talent, And So On. But The Ones We Tend To Stay In Love With Are, In The Long Run, The Ones Who Do A Decent Job Loving Us Back.

Relationships Unlock Certain Parts Of Who We Are Supposed To Be.

What I Believe Is Not What I Say I Believe; What I Believe Is What I Do.

More Than My Questions About The Efficacy Of Social Actions Were My Questions About My Own Motives. Do I Want Social Justice For The Oppressed Or Do I Jusy Want To Be Known As A Socially Active Person? I Spend 95 Percent Of My Time Thinking About Myself Anyway. I Dont Have To Watch The Evening News To See The World Is Bad, I Only Have To Look At Myself. I Am Not Brow Beating Here, I Am Only Saying That True Charge , True Living Giving, God Honoring Change Would Have To Start With The Individual. I Was The Very Problem I Had Been Protesting. I Wanted To Make A Sign That Read “i Am The Problem

Before I Studied Story, I Was Trying To Write A Novel, And It Was Terrible. It Wasn't Going Anywhere, And I Couldn't Figure Out What I Was Trying To Do. It Was Really Hard; Much Harder Than I Thought It Was Going To Be. Now That I've Studied Story, I Think I'd Have A Different Approach And Maybe I Could Actually Get It Done.

No, Life Cannot Be Understood Flat On A Page. It Has To Be Lived; A Person Has To Get Out Of His Head, Has To Fall In Love, Has To Memorize Poems, Has To Jump Off Bridges Into Rivers, Has To Stand In An Empty Desert And Whisper Sonnets Under His Breath... We Get One Story, You And I, And One Story Alone. God Has Established The Elements, The Setting And The Climax And Resolution. It Would Be A Crime Not To Venture Out, Wouldn't It?" -donald Miller,through Painted Deserts

Falling In Love

Some People Skip Through Life. Others Are Dragged Through It. I Sometimes Wonder If We Are Moving Through Time, Or Whether Time Is Moving Through Us. Light, Unlike Anything Else In The Universe Is Not Effected By Time. Light Exists Outside Of Time.. It Is Still A Mystery To Physicists.

I Think It's Very Hard For Us, For Christians, To Understand That It's Okay To Read A Book, For Instance, On How To Manage Your Time. There's Nothing Wrong With That.

Without The Christian Explanation Of Original Sin, The Seemingly Silly Story Of Adam And Eve And The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, There Was No Explanation Of Conflict. At All.

The Most Attractive Characteristic In A Person Is The Story They Are Telling The World. We Stop And Stare At Stories.

We Live On Top Of The Created World, I Think To Myself, Not In It.

The Very Scary Thing About Religion, To Me, Is That People Actually Believe God Is Who They Think He Is.

What Do Markets Do? They Consolidate, They Breakout, They Extend, They Overextend, They Back And Fill, They Consolidate, And Repeat The Process. That's All You Need To Know About The Markets.

And Through A Dark Night Of The Soul, I Came To Realize That Salvation Happens Through A Mysterious, Indefinable, Relational Interaction With Jesus In Which We Become One With Him. I Realized Christian Conversion Worked More Like Falling In Love Than Understanding A Series Of Concepts Of Ideas. This Is Not To Say There Are No True Ideas, It Is Only To Say There Is Something Else, Something Beyond.

Falling In Love

She Knows Who She Is. She Just Forgot For A Little While.

I Need For There To Be Something Bigger Than Me. I Need Someone To Put Awe Inside Me; I Need To Come Second To Someone Who Has Everything Figured Out.

People Who Live Great Stories Know Failure Isn’t A Judgment, It’s An Education.

I Started Storyline After I'd Accomplished All My Goals And Still Wasn't Happy. I'd Become A New York Times Bestselling Author, Which Was My Goal From High School, And Yet I Was Less Happy After Accomplishing My Goals Than I Was Before.

It Comforts Me To Think That If We Are Created Beings, The Thing That Created Us Would Have To Be Greater Than Us, So Much Greater, In Fact, That We Would Not Be Able To Understand It. It Would Have To Be Greater Than The Facts Of Our Reality, And So It Would Seem To Us, Looking Out From Within Our Reality That It Would Contradict Reason. But Reason Itself Would Suggest It Would Have To Be Greater Than Reality, Or It Would Not Be Reasonable.

We Don't Know How Much We Are Capable Of Loving Until The People We Love Are Being Taken Away, Until A Beautiful Story Is Ending.

The More I Try To Impress People, The More I Separate Myself From Them. Vulnerability Attracts Love.

We Don't Naturally Want To Take Responsibility For Our Lives. We Want To Give The Responsibility To Someone Else. We Blame Them When Our Lives Aren't Good.

Of His New Book, Don Says: “it Might Be The Greatest Book Ever Written. I Don’t Think Anybody Is Going To Read A Book Again After They Read My New One. I Think God Is Proud Of Me. I Am Going To Make A Killing Off This Thing And I’m Going To Use The Money To Go To Space.

It Made Me Wonder If The Reasons Our Lives Seem So Muddled Is Because We Keep Walking Into Scenes In Which We, Along With The People Around Us, Have No Clear Idea What We Want.

All The Trees Are Losing Their Leaves, And Not One Of Them Is Worried.

I Think, In The Grand Epic, Jesus Is The Hero Of Our Stories. And Our Stories, As They Were, Are Subplots In A Grand Epic And Our Job Is Not To Be The Hero Of Any Story. Our Job Is To Be A Saint In A Story That He Is Telling.

There Are Things You Cannot Understand, And You Must Learn To Live With This. Not Only Must You Learn To Live With This, You Must Learn To Enjoy This.

I Don't Know Why It Is, Exactly, But The People With The Healthiest Self-esteem, Are Also The Greatest At Intimacy. I'm Not Talking About Arrogant People. I'm Talking About People Who Know They Are Both Good And Bad Yet Believe At The Deepest Level They Are Really Good For People.

The Greatest Stories Go To Those Who Don’t Give In To Fear.

The Thing About Being Irresponsible Is It's Only Cute Till You Are About Twenty-two Or So, Then It Becomes A Liability. One Day You Wake Up Under A Pizza Box, The Television Blaring In Your Bedroom, The Laundry Piled Up Over What Might Be A Bedside Table, And You Ask Yourself: 'how Did My Life Get Like This? Why Don't People Like Me? Didn't I Have A Cat And What Is That Smell?'

I Am A Person Of Faith, So I Come From A Community That's Involved In 360,000 Churches Across The Country, That Is An Institution That Could, In A Relatively Short Period Of Time, Provide Hundreds Of Thousands, If Not Millions, Of Positive Male Role Models.

It Is Worthy Of Note That The Chinese And Japanese Characters For Money And Gold Are The Same.

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 … The Great Stories Go To Those Who Don’t Give In To Fear.

Let Probability And Sample Size Do The Heavy Lifting.

There's No Authoritarian Structure At Reed College, But The Education Is Conservative. So What You Have Is A Lot Of Students Who Are Very Authentically Looking For Truth.

The Real Voice Is Stiller And Smaller And Seems To Know, Without Confusion, The Difference Between Right And Wrong And The Subtle Delineation Between The Beautiful And Profane. It's Not An Agitated Voice, But Ever Patient As Though It Approves A Million False Starts. The Voice I Am Talking About Is A Deep Water Of Calming Wisdom.

By Accepting God's Love For Us, We Fall In Love With Him, And Only Then Do We Have The Fuel We Need To Obey.

Falling In Love

I Think This Is When Most People Give Up On Their Stories. They Come Out Of College Wanting To Change The World, Wanting To Get Married, Wanting To Have Kids And Change The Way People Buy Office Supplies. But They Get Into The Middle And Discover It Was Harder Than They Thought. They Can't See The Distant Shore Anymore, And They Wonder If Their Paddling Is Moving Them Forward. None Of The Trees Behind Them Are Getting Smaller And None Of The Trees Ahead Are Getting Bigger. They Take It Out On Their Spouses, And They Go Looking For An Easier Story.

I Can No More Understand The Totality Of God Than The Pancake I Made For Breakfast Understands The Complexity Of Me

If A Piece Of Genius Comes, It Comes, And It If Doesn't, It Doesn't.

I Kept Imagining These People, Just Living Their Daily Lives, And Then Having Them Suddenly Ended In Unjust Tragedy. When We Watch The News, We Grieve All Of This, But When We Go To The Movies, We Want More Of It. 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. We Think God Is Unjust, Rather Than A Master Storyteller.

It's Funny How You Can't Ask Difficult Questions In A Familiar Place, How You Have To Stand Back A Few Feet And See Things In A New Way Before You Realize Nothing That Is Happening To You Is Normal. The Trouble With You And Me Is We Are Used To What Is Happening To Us. We Grew Into Our Lives Like A Kernel Beneath The Earth, Never Able To Process The Enigma Of Our Composition...nothing Is Normal. It Is All Rather Odd, Isn't It, Our Eyes In Our Heads, Our Hands With Five Fingers, The Capacity To Understand Beauty, To Feel Love, To Feel Pain.

In The Age Of Information, Ignorance Is A Choice.

There Is Something Beautiful About A Billion Stars Held Steady By A God Who Knows What He Is Doing.

If The Point Of Life Is The Same As The Point Of A Story, The Point Of Life Is Character Transformation. If I Got Any Comfort As I Set Out On My First Story, It Was That In Nearly Every Story, The Protagonist Is Transformed. He's A Jerk At The Beginning And Nice At The End, Or A Coward At The Beginning And Brave At The End. If The Character Doesn't Change, The Story Hasn't Happened Yet. And If Story Is Derived From Real Life, If Story Is Just Condensed Version Of Life Then Life Itself May Be Designed To Change Us So That We Evolve From One Kind Of Person To Another.

We Believe We Will Be Made Whole By Our Accomplishments, Our Possessions, Or Our Social Status. It's Written In The Fabric Of Our Dna That Life Used To Be Beautiful And Now It Isn't, And If Only This And Only That, It Would Be Beautiful Again.

Moral #1: "if You Work Hard, Stay Focused, And Never Give Up, You Will Eventually Get What You Want In Life." Moral #2: Sometimes The Things We Want Most In Life Are The Things That Will Kill Us.

When You Fly Across The Country In An Airplane The Country Seems Vast; But It Isn't Vast. It's All Connected By Roads One Can Ride A Bike Down. If You Watch The News And There's A Tragedy At A House In Kansas, That Guy's Driveway Connects With Yours, And You'd Be Surprised By How Few Roads It Takes To Get There.

Dying For Something Is Easy Because It Is Associated With Glory. Living For Something Is The Hard Thing. Living For Something Extends Beyond Fashion, Glory, Or Recognition. We Live For What We Believe.

Nobody Will Listen To You Unless They Sense That You Like Them.

Everybody Wants To Be Somebody Fancy. Even If They're Shy.

Humans Are Designed To Seek Comfort And Order, And So If They Have Comfort And Order, They Tend To Plant Themselves, Even If Their Comfort Isn't All That Comfortable. And Even If They Secretly Want For Something Better.

And If These Mountains Had Eyes, They Would Wake To Find Two Strangers In Their Fences, Standing In Admiration As A Breathing Red Pours Its Tinge Upon Earth's Shore. These Mountains, Which Have Seen Untold Sunrises, Long To Thunder Praise But Stand Reverent, Silent So That Man's Weak Praise Should Be Given God's Attention.

It Is When People Do Not Allow God To Show Up Through Them ... That The World Collapses In On Itself.

Imagine, A Being With A Mind As Great As God's, With Feet Like Trees And A Voice Like Rushing Wind, Telling You That You Are His Cherished Creation.

I Asked God To Help Me Understand The Story Of The Forest And What It Means To Be A Tree In That Story.

Other People Keep Our Souls Alive, Just Like Food And Water Does With Our Body.

Half The Time I Pick Up A Book, That's What I'm Trying To Get.

I'm The Kind Of Person Who Wants To Present My Most Honest, Authentic Self To The World, So I Hide Backstage And Rehearse Honest And Authentic Lines Until The Curtain Opens.

There Is A Time When Every Person Who Encounters Jesus, Who Believes Jesus Is The Son Of God, Decides That They Will Spend Their Life Following Him. Some People, Like The Apostle Paul, Make This Decision The Minute They Meet Him, The Minute They Become A Christian. Others, Like The Apostle Peter, Endure Years Of Half-hearted Commitment And Spiritual Confusion Before Leaping In With All Their Passion. Still Others May Enjoy Some Benefits Of God's Love And Grace Without Entering Into The True Joy Of A Marriage With Their Maker.

And When You Find Love, Or When You Are Mature Enough To Understand It, The Feeling You Get Is Gratitude.

The Sexual Conquest Is Huge With Men In Terms Of Affirming Themselves And Their Feelings Of Masculinity. That's A Misguided Kind Of Affirmation. That Is Not Helpful, But That Stuff Happens.

Every Creative Person, And I Think Probably Every Other Person, Faces Resistance When They Are Trying To Create Something Good...the Harder The Resistance, The More Important The Task Must Be.

Every Human Being Is Searching For A Deep Sense Of Meaning, And Yet We're All Chasing Success. We've Confused One For The Other.

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 Acknowledgment. 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 Instead Of Grateful Participants.

Right, But You Know, What Would Any Of Us Lose By Losing Our Possessions. Maybe We Would Gain Something, Like Relationships, Like The Beauty Of Good Friends, Intimacy, You Know What I Mean, Man? Like We Wouldn't Be Losing Anything If We Lost Our Stuff, We'd Be Gaining Everything.

Somehow I Had Come To Believe That Because A Person Is In Need, They Are Candidates For Sympathy, Not Just Charity. It Was Not That I Wanted To Buy Her Groceries, The Government Was Already Doing That. I Wanted To Buy Her Dignity. And Yet, By Judging Her, I Was The One Taking Her Dignity Away.

I Think That's The True Litmus Test For Someone Who Has Become Closer To Jesus: Their Heart Is More Loving, Accepting, Childlike, Less Believing That They Have All The Answers And More Believing In Him.

Book Of Ecclesiastes, God Is Saying... Write A Good Story, Take Somebody With You And Let Me Help

Our Lives Have A Countdown Clock That We Can't See. Mine Reminds Me To Only Do Work That Matters.

But The People Who Took The Bus Didn't Experience The City As We Experienced The City. The Pain Made The City More Beautiful. The Story Made Us Different Characters Than We Would Have Been If We Had Skipped The Story And Showed Up At The Ending An Easier Way.

I Think We Can Provide Better Stories Through Providing Mentors, And Certainly Part Of My Story Is Providing Mentors To Kids Growing Up Without Dads. I Think Positive Male Role Models Go A Long Way In Terms Of Rescuing Kids From A Life Of Trouble.i Think Positive Male Role Models Go A Long Way In Terms Of Rescuing Kids From A Life Of Trouble.

To Be In A Relationship With God Is To Be Loved Purely And Furiously. And A Person Who Thinks Himself Unlovable Cannot Be In A Relationship With God Because He Can't Accept Who God Is; A Being That Is Love. We Learn That We Are Lovable Or Unlovable From Other People. That Is Why God Tells Us So Many Times To Love Each Other.

I'm Amazed At How Much My Writing Is Improved When I Step Away From The Computer, Even In Small Amounts. If I'm Stuck, I Vacuum The Living Room Or Walk The Dog. I'm Amazed At What Comes Out Of That... We Have To Realize That Part Of The Writing Life Where We're Sitting Down At The Computer Is Harvesting The Crops, But You Have To Have Planted Them And Watered Them And Created Fertile Soil - And That's A Life.

Earthly Love… Is Temporal And Slight So That Is Has To Be Given Again And Again In Order For Us To Feel Any Sense Of Security; But God’s Love, God’s Voice And Presence, Would Instill Our Souls With Such Affirmation We Would Need Nothing More And Would Cause Us To Love Other People So Much We Would Be Willing To Die For Them.

There Is Something Beautiful About A Billion Stars Held Steady By A God Who Knows What He Is Doing. (they Hang There, The Stars, Like Notes On A Page Of Music, Free-form Verse, Silent Mysteries Swirling In The Blue Like Jazz.) And As I Lay There, It Occurred To Me That God Is Up There Somewhere.

There Are About 360,000 Churches In America, So We Could Mentor A Million Kids Within A Short Period Of Time If Everyone Signed On, Which, Of Course, Is A Pipedream, But We're Going To Reach Toward That.

Sometimes You Have To Watch Somebody Love Something Before You Can Love It Yourself.

You Cannot Be A Christian Without Being A Mystic

For Me, The Beginning Of Sharing My Faith With People Began By Throwing Out Christianity And Embracing Christian Spirituality, A Nonpolitical Mysterious System That Can Be Experienced But Not Explained.

We Don't Need As Much As We Have. Hardly Any Of Us Need As Much Money As We Have. It's True What They Say About The Best Things In Life Being Free.

Suffering Ceases To Be Suffering When You Have A Redemptive Perspective.

I Think That Every Living Person, Every Person Who Is Awake To The Functioning Principles Within His Reality Has A Moment Where He Stops Blaming The Problems In The World On Group Thinking, On Humanity And Authority, And Starts To Face Himself. I Hate This More Than Anything. This Is The Hardest Principle Within Christian Spirituality For Me To Deal With. The Problem Is Not Out There, The Problem Is The Needy Beast Of A Thing Living In My Chest.

I Think Writers Would Do Better To Consider That Idea [to Write To Yourself], Because You Know Yourself Really Well, And You Never Know Your Demographic Fully. You Only Get Into Trouble If You Try To Please Somebody You Don't Really Understand.

Fear Is A Manipulative Emotion That Can Trick Us Into Living A Boring Life.

I Have Sometimes Wondered If The Greatest Desire Of Man Is To Be Known And Loved Anyway.

When You Write, You're Alone In A Room. And When Someone Reads A Book, They're Alone In A Room, Too, Usually. It's A Really Intimate Exchange. And So People Ask Me Where I Get The Boldness To Talk About This Or That, But I Didn't Feel Like It Required Any Sort Of Courage, Because I Was Alone. Sometimes It Feels Weird For People To Read It.

I Think The Best Thing A Person Can Do Is To Read Through The Gospels In The Bible And Really Look At Jesus, Because If A Person Does This, They Will Realize That The Jesus They Learned About In Sunday School Or The Jesus They Hear Jokes About Or The Skinny, Gandhi Jesus That Exists In Their Imaginations Isn't Anything Like The Real Jesus At All.

The Words 'alone,' 'lonely,' And 'loneliness' Are Three Of The Most Powerful Words In The English Language. Those Words Say That We Are Human; They Are Like The Words Hunger And Thirst. But They Are Not Words About The Body, They Are Words About The Soul.

A Story Is A Character Who Wants Something And Overcomes Conflict To Get It.

I Often Learn More About Myself From Listening To The Life Story Of A Friend Than I Do Reflecting On My Own Story.

I Know Our Culture Will Sometimes Understand A Love For Jesus As Weakness. There Is This Lie Floating Around That Says I Am Supposed To Be Able To Do Life Alone, Without Any Help, Without Stopping To Worship Something Bigger Than Myself. But I Actually Believe There Is Something Bigger Than Me, And I Need For There To Be Something Bigger Than Me. I Need Someone To Put Awe Inside Me; I Need To Come Second To Someone Who Has Everything Figured Out.

The Truth Is There Are A Million Steps, And We Don't Even Know What The Steps Are, And Worse, At Any Given Moment We May Not Be Willing Or Even Able To Take Them; And Still Worse, They Are Different For You And They Are Always Changing. I Have Come To Believe The Sooner We Will Fall In Love With The God Who Keeps Shaking Things Up, Keeps Changing The Path, Keeps Rocking The Boat To Test Our Faith In Him, Teaching Us To Not Rely On Easy Answers, Bullet Points, Magic Mantras, Or Genies In Lamps, But Rather In His Guidance, His Existence, His Mercy, And His Love.

Falling In Love

There Are Two Types Of Men In This World--one Is Looking For A Woman To Make His Life Complete And The Other Is Looking For A Woman To Join His Complete Life.

Most Of Us Are Waiting. We're Waiting For Something Interesting To Happen. And I Think We're Going To Wait Forever If We Don't Do Something More Interesting With Our Lives.

I Think Understanding Your Life As A Story Is A Really Terrific Way Of Kind Of Knowing Where You Are And Knowing Who You Are.

Knowing Who You Are

...if I Do Not Introduce People To Jesus, Then I Don't Believe Jesus Is An Important Person. It Doesn't Matter What I Say.

I Believe The Greatest Trick Of The Devil Is Not To Get Us Into Some Sort Of Evil But Rather Have Us Wasting Time. This Is Why The Devil Tries So Hard To Get Christians To Be Religious. If He Can Sink A Man's Mind Into Habit, He Will Prevent His Heart From Engaging God. I Was Into Habit.

I Want To Start Replacing My “fix” Response With An “enjoy” Response And Just Let People Be Themselves.

We Don't Think Of Our Flaws As The Glue That Binds Us To The People We Love, But They Are. Grace Only Sticks To Your Imperfections.

It Blew My Mind That What I Was Thinking Was Actually Applicable To People's Lives, And It Certainly Revolutionized Family.

*i Want To Keep Walking Away From The Person I Was A Moment Ago... *so Soon You Will Be In That Part Of The Book Where You Are Holding The Bulk Of The Pages In Your Left Hand, And Only A Thin Wisp Of The Story In Your Right. *we Get One Story, You And I, And One Story Alone....it Might Be Time For You To Go. It Might Be Time To Change, To Shine Out.

If You Don't Feel Free And Be Yourself, You Can't Connect. Find People Who Accept Your Quirks. They'll Heal Your Soul.

...i Should Have People Around Bugging Me And Getting Under My Skin Because Without People I Could Not Grow - I Could Not Grow In God, And I Could Not Grow As A Human.

All This Beauty Exists So You And I Can See His Glory, His Artwork. It's Like An Invitation To Worship Him, To Know Him.

He Thought About The Story His Daughter Was Living And The Role She Was Playing Inside That Story. He Realized He Hadn't Provided A Better Role For His Daughter. He Hadn't Mapped Out A Story For His Family. And So His Daughter Had Chosen Another Story, A Story In Which She Was Wanted, Even If She Was Only Being Used. In The Absence Of A Family Story, She'd Chosen A Story In Which There Was Risk And Adventure, Rebellion And Independence.

Good Stories Must Travel Through Conflict. And In Epic Stories, The Conflict Must Become Unbearable.

And So I Have Come To Understand That Strength, Inner Strength, Comes From Receiving Love As Much As It Comes From Giving It.

I Think If You Like Somebody You Have To Tell Them. It Might Be Embarrassing To Say It, But You Will Never Regret Stepping Up. I Know From Personal Experience, However, That You Should Not Keep Telling A Girl That You Like Her After She Tells You She Isn't Into It. You Should Not Keep Riding Your Bike By Her House Either.

God Doesn't Give Us Crying, Pooping Children Because He Wants To Advance Our Careers.

When You Stop Expecting People To Be Perfect, You Can Like Them For Who They Are.

Without A Positive Male Role Model In Your Life It Is Extremely Difficult To Become A Man Who Benefits His Family And Benefits Society.

If We Hear, In Our Inner Ear, A Voice Saying We Are Failures, We Are Losers, We Will Never Amount To Anything, This Is The Voice Of Satan Trying To Convince The Bride That The Groom Does Not Love Her. This Is Not The Voice Of God. God Woos Us With Kindness. He Changes Out Of Character With The Passion Of His Love.

I Used To Write When I Was In The Mood Or Felt Inspired. Anymore, I Write Whether I Feel Inspired Or Not. It's A Discipline. So That's Definitely Different. It's Part Of Maturing As A Person And As A Professional.

I'm Just Trying To Make The Point That The Story We're Telling Ourselves Is Often Very Different From The Story We're Telling The People Around Us.

Great Writers Know What To Cut Out. It's The Same In Life. Clear Ambitions. Clear Relationships. This Is The Stuff Of Good Story.

...she Wanted God To Make Sense. He Doesn't. He Will Make No More Sense To Me Than I Will Make Sense To An Ant.

When I Walked Into The Christian Section Of A Bookstore, The Message Was Clear: Faith Is Something You Do Alone. Rick Does Not Have Much Tolerance For People Living Alone. He's Like Bill Clinton In That He Feels Everyone's Pain. If Rick Thinks Somebody Is Lonely, He Can't Sleep At Night. He Wants Us All To Live With Each Other And Play Nice So He Can Get Some Rest. Tortured Soul.

It's Not What People Do That Scares Me. It's What They Hide. It's The Secrets That Keep Us From Bonding And Create Distrust. If We Were More Willing To Accept Each Other's Depravity We'd Be More United, We'd Be More Honest. If You Hide Two Things From Me, I'll Assume You're Hiding A Million. And I'll Keep You At A Distance. I'm Not Afraid Of The Evil In You. It's In Me Too.

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.

At The End Of The Day, When I Am Lying In Bed And I Know The Chances Of Any Of Our Theology Being Exactly Right Are A Million To One, I Need To Know That God Has Things Figured Out, That If My Math Is Wrong We Are Still Going To Be Okay. And Wonder Is That Feeling We Get When We Let Go Of Our Silly Answers, Our Mapped Out Rules That We Want God To Follow. I Don't Think There Is Any Better Worship Than Wonder.

And There Is Something Profoundly Humbling About Knowing God. I’m Not Talking About The Trinket God Or The Genie-in-a-lamp God. I Mean The God Who Invented The Tree In My Front Yard, The Beauty Of My Sweetheart, The Taste Of A Blueberry, The Violence Of A River At Flood. There Are A Lot Of Religious Trends That Would Have Us Controlling God, Telling Us That If We Do This That And The Other, God Will Jump Through Our Hoops Like A Monkey. But This Other God, This Real God, Is Awesome And Strong, All-encompassing And Passionate, And For Reasons I Will Never Understand, He Wants To Father Us.

There's A Lot Of Letters, And A Lot Of People Come Say "hi" At Book Signings, But I'm Amazed At How Normal Everybody Is.

I Think Life Is Staggering And We're Just Too Used To It.

I Posted The First Three Chapters And I Had Enough People Say That Chapter Two Was Dragging That I Cut It Out Just Before The Book Went To Press. And I'm Glad I Did. The Book Is A Lot Better Without It.

I Loved The Fact That It Wasn't My Responsibility To Change Somebody, That It Was God's, That My Part Was Just To Communicate Love And Approval.

It Confuses Me That Christian Living Is Not Simpler. The Gospel, The Very Good News, Is Simple.

I Could Not Have Known Then That Everybody, Every Person, Has To Leave, Has To Change Like Seasons; They Have To Or They Die. The Seasons Remind Me That I Must Keep Changing.

Most Great Art Is Freedom Within Form. Without Form, We Are Amateurs, Without Freedom, We Are Robots.

Too Much Of Our Time Is Spent Trying To Chart God On A Grid, And Too Little Is Spent Allowing Our Hearts To Feel Awe. By Reducing Christian Spirituality To Formula, We Deprive Our Hearts Of Wonder.

Even Our Beliefs Have Become Trend Statements. We Don’t Even Believe Things Because We Believe Them Anymore. We Only Believe Things Because They Are Cool Things To Believe.

Everybody Has To Leave, Everybody Has To Leave Their Home And Come Back So They Can Love It Again For All New Reasons.

If The Point Of Life Is The Same As The Point Of A Story, The Point Of Life Is Character Transformation.

The Ambitions We Have Will Become The Stories We Live.

Nothing Is Going To Change In Congo Until You And I Figure Out What Is Wrong With The Person Inside The Mirror

Sometimes The Story We're Telling The World Isn't Half As Endearing As The One That Lives Inside Us.

If You Watched A Movie About A Guy Who Wanted A Volvo And Worked For Years To Get It, You Wouldn’t Cry At The End When He Drove Off The Lot, Testing The Windshield Wipers. You Wouldn’t Tell Your Friends You Saw A Beautiful Movie Or Go Home And Put A Record On To Think About The Story You’d Seen. The Truth Is, You Wouldn’t Remember That Movie A Week Later, Except You’d Feel Robbed And Want Your Money Back. Nobody Cries At The End Of A Movie About A Guy Who Wants A Volvo.

Passion About Nothing Is Like Pouring Gasoline In A Car Without Wheels. It Isn't Going To Lead Anybody Anywhere.

Christ, In Short, Asks Us To Give Everything, All Our False Redemption In The Lifeboat, All Our False Ideas About Who God Is, All Our Trust In Something Other Than God To Redeem Us. In So Doing, We Die To Our Broken Natures In Exchange For His Perfect Nature, And Find Unification With Him That Will Allow God To See Us As One.

People Want To Join A Great Story. If You Want To Lead, Tell One With Your Life.

If We Knew How Much God Loved Us And Was For Us, We’d Talk To Him All Day Long.

In An Age In Which We Can Project An Image And Score That Image Based On Immediate Facebook And Twitter Feedback, Thus Making A Video Game Of Life And A False-reality Composed Of Lies, What Gets Lost Is A Joyful Obsession With The Work We Create From The Purest Of Motives, A Sheer Joy In The Act Of Creation Itself That Causes Us To Lose Ourselves In Something Else, And In A Way Die To Ourselves Over The Absolute Love Of A Thing We Are Breathing Into Life.

We Shouldn’t Be Afraid To Embrace Whimsy, That Nagging Idea That Life Could Be Magical; It Could Be Special If We Were Only Willing To Take A Few Risks.

Good Writers Show Rather Than Tell. Stories Are Told In Action. Life Stories Are No Different.

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Giacomo Leopardi

Barbara Januszkiewicz

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