June 7, 2007
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remember this day
John learned to ride his bike. as he pushed off and rode down the sidewalk without me…very symbolic. letting go.
“Where will you go?”
“America”
“America? We are in America right now, Don.”
“Yeah, i know, but there are other parts to America…i was looking at the map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were other places that were more green with big lumpy mountains. i’d like to go to those places.”
“Do you think God is out there somewhere? out there in the lumpy places?”
“i think God is everywhere.”
“Then why do you have to leave?”
“Because i can’t be here anymore. i don’t feel whole here…it feels like i should go back and get the person i am and bring him here to the person i should be…do you know what i am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”
*
“If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you. people hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. if you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something they don’t, some clue to the meaning of the universe. passion is tricky, though, because it cam point to nothing as easily as it points to something. “
*
“I’ve had about fifty people tell me that i fear intimacy. and it is true. i fear what people will think of me, and that is the reason i don’t date very often. people really like me alot when they only know me alittle, but i have this great fear that if they knew me alot they wouldn’t like me. that is the number one thing that scares me about having a wife is because she would have to know me pretty well in order to marry me and i think if she got to know me pretty well she wouldn’t like me anymore.”
*
ok. no way can i type this whole thing out for you…but…Don Miller (all of this is from “Blue Like Jazz” by the way) wrote this as part of a play for a couple who was heading for divorce. the guy comes in and speaks this to the woman while she is sleeping:
“What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? what great force, that though i went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your keeping, your staying, your will fleshed into mine, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that i fear, the soul that i loathe, the soul that: if you will love, i will love. i will redeem you, if you will redeem me? is this our purpose, you and i together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and i invented our of our own clay? i am not scared of you, my love, i am scared of me.
i went looking, i wrote out a list, i drew an image, i bled a poem of you. you were pretty, and my friends believed i was worthy of you. you were clever, but i was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you. you see, love, i did not love you, i loved me. and you were only a tool that i used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. and though i have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, i walk alone, for i cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest i believe that i am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.
i want desperately for you to be my friend. but you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man i wanted to be, the man i pretended to be, and i was your Jesus, and, you were mine. should i show you who i am, we may crumble. i am not scared of you, my love, i am scared of me…”
*
“Don, if we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”
“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.”
Comments (1)
I loved this book.
Not because it was necessarily the most profound thing I’d ever read. There are books much more profound. Much more theologically intune.
I loved it becasue it was profound in a simple way. It was profound in its brutal honesty. I didn’t always agree with him but there was something about his his self reflection and self revalation. His honesty about himself gave me permission to look honestly at myself also.
He does simplicity and honesty like Rob Bell could only dream of doing. Don Miller has a gift from God, though I’m not sure exactly what that gift is… The gift of exposing people’s hearts?
What ever it is, it speaks more powerfully to me than all of the theological text books I have ever read.