Some late night randomness...

So this post probably won't amount to a lot and that's fine. I'm sure later in the week I will have something deep and such to post but tonight I just want to throw some thoughts out there. I've been reading over the past couple days the book Through Painted Deserts by Donald Miller and this whole time it has been reminding me of me. As I was turning the pages the more I read the more I saw me coming out in the experiences Don and Paul faced traveling from Texas to Oregon, and then a little ways into Washington and back to Oregon.. The whole book just amazed me and at times moved me to damn near tears. Anyways so like I said the book travels the two friends on a road trip to the northwest and the experiences they have along the way and a HUGE theme in the book is asking the why questions in life instead of the how questions and that is something I have begun to strive to do. I can't live life anymore asking stuff like, how do I get the girl of my dreams? or how do I know if I've found the right job? Now I have to ask stuff like, why am I here? or why did God give us free will to ruin his great creation and then still command the mountains to keep quiet so our rare and faint praise can be heard? I realized while reading the book that I don't have, much like Don figured out on his trip, people all figured out, let alone God.

I think many times when Don talks about how we don't need all the noise of the radio and that we come truly alive when we are away from the commercialization of life, that he has hit the nail on the head. Lets look at this thought for a second God didn't create man to long for cars, money, and houses. God made us to exist for His greatness. We were made to exalt God and it was only after the fall that we looked to other things for fullness. I have a quote from the book I would like to close this with. I think it sums up well how I've been feeling for awhile, especially these past couple days as I've read this story.

"I was raised to believe that the quality of a man's life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart's knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple, but this is the gate, the trailhead. Ironing out faithless creases is toilsome labor. God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All the leads to God, I think. Perhaps this is what is on the other side of the commercials, on the other side of the curtain behind which the Wizard of Oz pulls his levers. Matter and thought are a canvas on which God paints, a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption. Life is a dance toward God, I begin to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps or toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.

I begin to think of me time at the canyon in these terms, as learning to dance in a new way, the first few lessons had me feeling clunky and awkward, but soon they will give way to a kind of graceful sway, and I won't stop at gift shops or hunt for a television, but like Paul I will be able to stand over a pot of boiling beans for hours and feel completely content, as though there was nothing in life that I was missing out on. It gives me a little joy to think about things this way, and I smile at a couple as they pass me along the guardrail, and I pull a bit of pine needle off a tree and roll it in my palms and smell the mintlike scent of creation as I let the green shards spill from my palms to the path along the rim. And I think to myself, There is nothing I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God." - Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts.

Thank you for bearing with me through that long quote from the book. I hope you are all blessed and challenged by Don's thoughts and I will be praying and listening for the next message God has for me to share with you all. One love.