These thoughts came to me while reading Donald Miller’s book, and feed my growing resentment of him. I recognize them as problems, but cannot honestly say that I am willing to surrender them.
1) I think I am intellectually and morally superior to everyone on the planet.
This specific combination makes it easy to live without a great […]

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I thought that art had gone out of the world. But I read Miller and I know that I was wrong. And today, I don’t resent him for it. I believe there is a sickness in the mind of modern man that tells us we have outgrown beauty and greatness. Ayn Rand’s villains ooze the attitude, just as she oozes self-righteousness. It’s great to see something beautiful that just is, like a tree, or the sky, and to see it man or man’s works, which so seldom just are.

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My life had become something to hide; there were secrets in it. My thoughts were private thoughts, my lies were barriers that protected my thoughts, my sharp tongue a weapon to protect me.
For a long time I thought I was the only one who lived this way. Today I can thank God that I’m one […]

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What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality.
I wasted years worshipping a “slot machine God.” I was just playing God myself. Thank God it didn’t work!

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For me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and God. I could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual Being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing.
It takes a miracle to meet God in church. But then, it […]

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If you would have asked me, I suppose I would have told you there was a God, but I could not have formulated a specific definition based on my personal experience. Perhaps it was because my Sunday school classes did much to help us memorize commandments and little to teach us who God was and […]

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…the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father
and longing
I understood what a father did as well as I understood the task of a shepherd.
We know God analogously, not univocally. We know Him by what He is like and what He is not (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa […]

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This chapter relates how Miller began his walk towards knowing God, or using Miller’s own picture, how God has walked closer and closer to him. The chapter reminds me of Augustine’s Confessions, only written for religious outsiders rather than insiders. It is beautiful and personal.
Miller dwells on the obstacles to knowing God personally: not looking […]

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Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I believed in other people’s belief in God before I believed God could and would save me.

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For David Gentiles
An actual person or for Gentiles who are like King David?

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