Donald Miller
So I’m in the middle of Blue like Jazz by Donald Miller, and unlike the first time I tried to read it 6 months ago, I am absolutely loving it! I bought it after hearing all the rave reviews from people and tried it, only to give up after 15-20 pages because I got so frustrated by his somewhat rambling style of writing. Well I was looking for a good book at Borders the other day and ran across another of his books called Searching for God Knows What and after reading the title and summary, I decided to give it a try – and it was awesome! He’s still a bit ramble-y (I know that’s not really a word), but it’s so great and he expresses so many fears and questions and random things that I can relate to – quite brilliant really… Anyway, so I got my copy of Blue like Jazz back after having loaned it out to several people (who all enjoyed it immensely) and I’m now probably close to halfway through it – and I’m really enjoying it now – I’ve laughed several times, and not just the little silent chuckle, but the ‘I’m out in public and laughing out loud and people are looking’ kind of laugh – embarassing but still funny! So, I highly recommend both those books, plus he’s written other books, but I haven’t read them yet – Matthew’s reading Through Painted Deserts now, so I’ll find out how good that one is soon.
I still have a rather large stack of books that I’m working on, including one written by a scientist who’s a Christian about his struggles with connecting his faith with his work – really good so far, but pretty dense for bedtime reading, so it’s slow going… I can always use suggestions for books to read, light or heavy reading!
From Blue like Jazz:
“In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion.”
“The ability to accept God’s unconditional grace and ferocious love is all the fuel we need to obey Him in return. Accepting God’s kindness and free love is something the devil does not want us to do. 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 convice the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness, He changes our character with the passion of His love.”
He’s so good at making connections between big faith ideas and normal everyday things, or at least things that we can try to grasp more easily than ‘God stuff’ – like he talks about how penguins have an internal knowledge of when their eggs are about to hatch and that that’s how he feels about God, that he’s drawn to Him by some inexplicable force – and he says that people like to think about the love story of people and God being something like Romeo and Juliet when really it’s more like The taming of the shrew with the persistent lover chasing the reluctant bride – good stuff, eh?!?!