Book detail: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This collection includes three separate works: 'Blue Like Jazz', a memoir of a young man's spiritual journey; 'Through Painted Deserts', a narrative of a road trip across the American Southwest; and 'Searching for God', a philosophical exploration of religious beliefs.
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“Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“When we do what God wants us to do, we are blessed, we are spiritually healthy.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can't possibly carry all that we want it to.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“There is a time when every person who encounters Jesus, who believes Jesus is the Son of God, decides that they will spend their life following Him. Some people, like the Apostle Paul, make this decision the minute they meet Him, the minute they become a Christian. Others, like the Apostle Peter, endure years of half-hearted commitment and spiritual confusion before leaping in with all their passion. Still others may enjoy some benefits of God's love and grace without entering into the true joy of a marriage with their maker.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And 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
“It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I can't do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don't decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“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.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know. There are people who get addicted to buying new stuff. Things. Piles and piles of things. But the new things become old things so quickly. We need new things to replace the old things.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“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
“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
“...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 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
“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
“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 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
“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
“When I was in love there was somebody in the world who was more important than me, and that, given all that happened at the fall of man, is a miracle, like something God forgot to curse.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He's like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone's pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can't sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I love to give to charity, but I don't want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I used love like money, but love doesn't work like money. It is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. When the church does not love it's enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God
“I don't find anyone more noble than Jesus.”
Source: Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God