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Oh, Don Miller...
Entry 12 of 15 | show all | print this entry |
Don Miller is one of my favorite authors. His book, Through Painted Deserts, has been like an accompaniment to my own pilgrimage. Here's an excerpt that I love and I guess it's a plug for you, too :)
"...life is more that clothes and cars and a new flavor of toothpaste, that it is community and creation and beauty and humanity. And I think I am starting to prefer the latter to the former; by that I mean I am getting used to not having any music or television and not pulling over and buying something as a way of feeling some kind of change. There is a serenity in life, after all, and once a withdrawal is felt at having left the lies behind, a soul begins to feel at home in its own skin. The first day at the canyon there was a lot of withdrawal. I actually walked over to the gift shop and contemplated buying a little license-plate keychain with my name spelled on it. I talked myself out of it because I don't actually have any keys, but part of me just wanted to smell the smell of new rubber and have something new as a way of feeling different about myself. But I didn't buy it. I hiked back to canyon edge and watched the sun go down over the massive stretch of brown, and then I sat on the bench and watched lovers stroll along the guardrail and felt a quiet peace as the coolness gave way to coldness, which got me off the bench and had me walking along the canyon rim, praying, I think, and thanking God for beauty and for the rest and thanking Him for something better to believe than commercials.
I was raised to believe that the quality of a man's life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart's knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academi, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple, but this is the gate, the trailhead. Ironing out faithless creases is toilsome labor. God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All this leads to God, I think. Perhaps this is what is on the other side of the commercials, on the other side of the curtain behind which the Wizard of Oz pulls his levers. Matter and thought are a canvas on which God paints, a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption. Life is a dance toward God, I begin to think. And the dance is not to graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.
I begin to think of my time at the canyon in these terms, as learning to dance in a new way, the first few lessons had me feeling clunky and awkward, but soon they will give way to a kind of graceful sway, and I won't stop at gift shops or hunt for a television, but like Paul I will be able to stand over a pot of boiling beans for hours and feel completely content, as though there was nothing in life that I was missing out on. It gives me a little joy to think about things in this way, and I smile at a couple as they pass me along the guardrail, and I pull a bit of pine needle off a tree and roll it in my palms and smell the mintlike scent of creation as I let the green shards spill from my palms to the path along the rim. And I think to myself, There is nothing I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God."
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