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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.

Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.

You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.

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 can point to nothing as easily as it points to something.

I read this book and finished it a few weeks ago. I'd love to send it to someone who would like to read it too!

#coolcolors #colormepretty @Sweetkokoro

“Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.”

Sounds promising! Hopefully, it is a good read while I wait for Golden Son and Morning Star.

"I don't care why we get crushes on Emily Dickinson. It is a rite of passage for any thinking man. Any thinking American man."

I have received the official feline tongue blessing to begin this book that I've been meaning to read for like 10 years...

Phenomenally beautiful and simple. Why make Christianity hard and legalistic when..it isn't? Highly recommend.

🙌🏼

"I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing."

😂😂😂

I opened my used book and found this. Pretty cool.

This book was first published when I was on the #edgeofseventeen . It was pretty momentous for me during my slow and somewhat painful emergence from small town Christianity. I still think Donald Miller is a pretty cool guy.

#RockinMay

Like his other book I've read, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, this is a really honest account by Don of his thoughts on modern Christian spirituality. He goes into detail on how he lives out his faith compared to how he *should* be living out his faith, who God is, how to love Jesus, and more. Definitely worth a read if you're into getting deeper into your faith, and knowing why you believe what you believe.

Page 218

The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. ... I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.

There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn't. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on someone else.

Page 152

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

Pg 132

Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves.

p46
The thing I loved about Nadine was that I never felt like she was selling anything. She would talk about God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day. She was never ashamed, which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered. They felt like they had to sell God, as if He were soap or a vacuum cleaner, and it's like they weren't really listening to me, or didn't care, they just wanted me to buy their product.

Page 45

"She hates everybody, Don. She thinks people are out to get her...
"But she was normal at one time, right?" I once asked.
"Yes, she was beautiful and fun. I loved my mom, Don, and I still do. But I hate that her mind has been taken. I hate that I can't have normal interaction with her."

This was refreshing. It's sort of a loose collection of essays, on the author's own faith and his thoughts on what Christianity is/should be. I appreciated his distinction between Christianity and what he calls Christian spirituality... moving away from a dry religious system focused on theory & rules and toward a relational, practical faith. It's sparked a lot of thoughts on living my own faith, in practice rather than just in theory.

"...believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you *and* something you decide upon." I resonate with so much in this chapter!

"...believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you *and* something you decide upon." I resonate with so much in this chapter!

"... the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who's smarter, and honestly I don't care."

The back cover says Donald Miller is like Anne Lamott with testosterone. I have to agree!

Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

"Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled." Ouch. Yeah.

I'm a bit out of order with this one, having read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years first. So far, I'm not finding this one as compelling. Ironic, since A Million Miles is sort of the story of Miller turning Blue Like Jazz into a screenplay.