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By Rachael Cummings
“THE unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. For Donald Miller, it’s “the unedited life.”
It’s been six years since Miller’s Blue Like Jazz was published and slowly made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list; it has sold over a million copies to date.
BCCN spoke with Miller just before he began his ambitious 65-church tour across
North America. He was promoting his latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years – subtitled ‘What I Learned While Editing My Own Life.’
Miller said he was not uncomfortable with the thought that the book would make
complete strangers privy to some of his most private experiences – his insecurities, his heartaches, his views on politics and on God.
“I try not to think about it,” he said. “You put those things down, you e-mail them to the publisher, you don’t look back. It’s definitely kind of like jumping off a bridge, you know-- you hope the water’s deep enough. And it always has been.
“I don’t like people not knowing who I am, not knowing what my motives are. I feel like
there’s a lie between us when I handle ideas in any other way, and so it makes me more
comfortable . . . You know, it weeds people out. The people who like you, like
you; the people who don’t, don’t. You’re not really hiding a whole lot from them – although I don’t tell everything.”
While Miller writes of Christian spirituality, he readily admits he has no
definitive answers. In Miles, he declares:
“As a writer of nonfiction, I’m supposed to know what life is about; but to be honest, I don’t. I write books about faith, which only makes the job harder.
“When you write books about faith, people read them and expect to hear from God,
as though God calls me on the phone in the morning and says: ‘Write this down; I forgot to say this in the Bible.’ I know writers who actually approach their books this way – but none of them has given God my phone number.”
Speaking to BCCN, he elaborated on this point. “I would not put myself in the category of theologian or pastor. But at the same
time, you do acknowledge . . . the fact that you are informing people about
issues, and giving them a perspective that may influence the way that they
live. So I take responsibility for that, and I take it very seriously.
“However, there’s a whole other category for people you would go to and say, what does the Bible
think of the end times, or something like that. I’m a writer, and thinker, and stimulator of ideas, but certainly not a shepherd
of people.”
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On September 15, Miller fans poured into Tenth Avenue Church in Vancouver, to
hear the wordsmith wax eloquent about his personal perspective on the concept
of ‘story.’
Miller revealed to the audience that he had been approached by a pair of
filmmakers, who wanted to make a movie based on his memoir. He had agreed. The
hitch, however, was that they wanted to change Miller’s character and life to make for a “more interesting” story. “Your real life is boring,” they had told him. To prove them wrong, he was reduced to making claims such as
“I saw a bear, once.”
In the end, the author decided to ‘edit’ his own life, in a sense – and to find out what it takes to not only write a good story, but to live a
good story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years recounts how this journey unfolded.
Among other things, he said, he was inspired to start a mentoring program in
response to the crisis of fatherlessness in America. Miller was also motivated
to contact his own father, who had been absent from his life since he was a
child.
The author concluded his talk by encouraging Christians to stop shouting about
what they don’t like – and to focus, instead, on what they’re for, what they think is beautiful.
“We have to start telling better stories,” he declared.
October 2009
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