Hangin' with Donald Miller

If you enjoy this blog, you can thank Donald Miller.

He's best known for writing Blue Like Jazz, an autobiographical story of how he found God despite his church's attempt to reduce spirituality into a set of arbitrary rules and political ideology.  Having lived that story firsthand, I love that book. 

But it wasn't the one that changed my life.  It was after reading another of Miller's books, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, that I decided it was time to start writing again and do something more meaningful with my life.

The first post I ever wrote on this site took a quote from it:

"The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring stories, and if we want a Roomba vacuum cleaner, we are living stupid stories."

I decided then to live a more meaningful story. And last night, with this blog within a whisper of its 15,000th hit, the story included a chapter where I got to meet Donald Miller. 

Miller gave a lecture at Belmont University last night, and it turns out we have a mutual friend (who is also a writer), so I got to speak with Don for a just a few minutes when his lecture was done.

Sometimes people complain that they feel let down when they meet their hero. Donald Miller was the nicest famous person I've ever met.

I thanked him for inspiring me to start the blog. He seemed genuinely touched that he'd helped change the trajectory of my life. He signed the book I've re-read so many times by now, and he waited patiently while I awkwardly misdirected our mutual friend Mark how to take a picture with my new cell phone.

Miller writes with such strong opinions, that I was a little surprised that in person he was so pleasantly humble and unbound to his own ideas.  Of course, I don't agree with everything he's ever written (and I've read it all), but the time to discuss that wasn't last night.

Maybe next time it will be.

In the lecture he gave, my favorite analogy he gave was about how no one can prove a sunset is prettier than camel dung. But if you experience them both, it makes that reality undeniable.

It's the same way with God. I'll never prove God is real or argue you into believing what I do. But if those of us who claim to experience a loving power bigger than ourselves live lives that point toward something beautiful, maybe, just maybe, someone else will take a few steps closer to that beauty as well, and be positively changed for having seen it.

That's actually part of why this blog is here.

It hasn't brought me fame or fortune or even a cent of cash.  But among the 15,000 times someone has clicked on this site since Don inspired me to launch it, I hope at least a few of you found something beautiful, something that rang unprovably but undeniably true, or maybe just something funny that made a crappy day, week, or season in life seem just a little tolerable.

And if you did, you can thank Donald Miller. 

Just like I did.