By: Donald Miller
MANY people I know have already read this book, and I've yet to find someone who has read it that hasn't loved it, whether you are a Christian or not. Donald Miller does a fantastic job in this book of sharing his perspective on Christian spirituality without being "preachy" or one-sided on the topic. In many ways, it's an autobiography.
I don't exactly remember what triggered the desire to re-read this book, but I picked it up again today and I'm already halfway through it. Miller is one of the best writers I have ever read; his speech is breathtaking and eloquent, and he has a way of making you feel like you know the author personally.
I've posted a few quotes/passages from the book below. I really recommend at least attempting to read it. Borrow it from someone, check it out of a library, or buy it. If you haven't had the chance to read Blue Like Jazz, I recommend giving it a shot.
"It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn't make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the President. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse."
"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."
"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."
"Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way."
"It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality or it would not be reasonable."
"Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe."
"Love, for example, is a true emotion but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don't make any sense. I think one of the problems that Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant...I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me."
"Even out beliefs have become trend statements. We don't even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe. The problem with Christian belief--I mean real Christian belief, the belief that there is a God and a devil and a heaven and a hell-- is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe."
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