A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

I just finished reading my newest favorite book...A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. Loved it! He talks about how our lives are meant to be lived as stories...that we are meant to create memorable scenes in them. He speaks of a painful time in his life..."I didn't shave. I didn't eat. As my story stopped, so did I."..."After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality." I don't think I truly realized until a couple of years ago that I had been living for the most part in this numb state. Instead of living my life, I was letting it live me. I have experienced tragedy in my life that caused numbness...and I have experienced such heartbreak that I was paralyzed with a gut wrenching pain and never thought I would get up again. However, this book taught me that as painful as some of these memories are, they are memorable scenes in my life...they have taught me more than I wanted to know...they have made me who I am...and they have brought me closer to a God who has been there all along. Donald Miller goes on to say..."It was all very clean and neat on the outside, but on the inside my narrative was incoherent." A couple of years ago I was living a life I knew how to live...I was just going through the motions basically. And then I experienced something in my life that woke me up...for the first time in years I felt and I was alive...and now I don't know how to or want to live that old life. I want to live my story...I want to have memorable scenes...and I want to be part of the larger story. May each of you wake up and realize you have a story to live...