“We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and only that, it would be beautiful again.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“Fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life … the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.”
“Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn't diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can't explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me. But it wasn't like that with Jesus.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Movie Edition: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God's love will.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“By accepting God's love for us, we fall in love with Him, and only then do we have the fuel we need to obey.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“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.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“Even our beliefs have become trend statements.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Movie Edition: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.”
Source: Father Fiction: Chapters for a Fatherless Generation
“...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.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“...a beggar's kingdom is better than a proud man's delusion.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“...if I do not introduce people to Jesus, then I don't believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn't matter what I say.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“...I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Movie Edition: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“...I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“There are things you cannot understand, and you must learn to live with this. Not only must you learn to live with this, you must learn to enjoy this.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“Right, but you know, what would any of us lose by losing our possessions. Maybe we would gain something, like relationships, like the beauty of good friends, intimacy, you know what I mean, man? Like we wouldn't be losing anything if we lost our stuff, we'd be gaining everything.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I loved the fact that it wasn't my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God's, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I know our culture will sometimes understand a love for Jesus as weakness. There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me, and I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.”
“We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“At the end of the day, when I am lying in bed and I know the chances of any of our theology being exactly right are a million to one, I need to know that God has things figured out, that if my math is wrong we are still going to be okay. 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.”
“Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Movie Edition: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
Source: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”
“And through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize that salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts of ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond.”
“It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.”
“When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“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 convince the bride that the groom does not love her. This is not the voice of God. God woos us with kindness. He changes out of character with the passion of his love.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool.”
Source: Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
“Some people skip through life. Others are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder if we are moving through time, or whether time is moving through us. Light, unlike anything else in the universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.”
“I think that every living person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group thinking, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there, the problem is the needy beast of a thing living in my chest.”
“More than my questions about the efficacy of social actions were my questions about my own motives. Do i want social justice for the oppressed or do i jusy want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I dont have to watch the evening news to see the world is bad, i only have to look at myself. I am not brow beating here, i am only saying that true charge , true living giving, God honoring change would have to start with the individual. I was the very problem i had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read “I am the problem”
“Nothing is going to change in congo until you and i figure out what is wrong with the person inside the mirror”
“The heart responds to the conflict within a story.”
“The thing I loved about her was that I never felt like she was selling anything. She would talk to 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.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“THINGS JESUS NEVER SAID: "You should come with me to church.”
“God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can't do that watching television all the time.”
Source: Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road
“Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as 'Father' at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn't into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
