A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

20Feb10

This is a little late seeing as how I read this back in November and now I probably don’t even remember most of it… but I do remember how much I enjoyed reading it… couldn’t put it down actually. Donald Miller has always been a favorite author of mine. From the first time I read Blue Like Jazz, my eyes were opened to the possibility that someone could write about Christianity and spiritual truth and actually be funny, relate-able, and challenging while doing it. I’ll be honest, I was a little unsure before cracking this one open that maybe it wouldn’t be as good as Blue Like Jazz or Searching for God Knows What, kind of like the feeling you get right before you listen to your favorite band’s newest album – but in many ways A Million Miles in a Thousand Years was even better. I think this was a sort of coming-of-age book for Miller. He basically tells the story of the last few years of his life, since his success with Blue Like Jazz, and you get the sense that he has matured both as a writer and as a person. In Blue, he communicated many great truths, but from reading this story, it appeared as though he didn’t really live out what he wrote. Instead he was riding on the wave of his success and popularity until it left him in a place of laziness and selfishness. But now, it seems clear that he is living out what he writes because he is writing about the idea of living a good story, and he illustrates this with his own life and the “plot twist” it took. He writes the book about himself, about how he was approached by movie producers to turn his book Blue Like Jazz, and therefore his life (because it was largely a memoir), into a movie. The problem comes though when they begin telling him that they will need to rewrite much of it, however, to make it more interesting for the big screen. This caused him to wonder why the real story of his life wasn’t interesting enough as it was, which led to his realization that he wasn’t actually living a good story. He then goes on to tell how he became obsessed with learning more about the qualities of what makes up a good story and set out to change the way he was living. Much of the rest of the book is about the changes he made and the exciting events that came out of it… and not just self-fulfilling things like taking an exotic vacation, but things he has done that have a purpose to them, a purpose of helping others and making a difference in other people’s lives. At a certain point in the book, you realize that even though he is talking about his own story, this is really about everyone. We all end up in the rut of living out meaningless, boring, or stupid stories with our lives. When all is said and done, what will we be able to look back and say we did with our lives, and more importantly how did our stories honor God? One thing that jumped out at me was the fact that a good story is not without conflict… and overcoming that conflict is not without a certain amount of risk. This book was both an interesting and easy read and a compelling challenge to examine my own life and the story I am living. An instant personal favorite… I highly recommend and give it 5 out of 5 stars!

Posted by Jeff.

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