A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Don Miller learns to live an exciting story.  That should be the subtitle to this book.  In the process of trying to turn his Blue Like Jazz book into a movie, he comes face-to-face with the reality that he is living a boring life.  He has to sit down with the movie producers and turn his book into a screen play and he realizes his story lacks some essential pieces that make a good movie: purpose, conflict, and the resulting character.  So he attempts to change that.  He sets out to make his story more interesting, and in the process discovers his place in Jesus’ story as well as a bunch of other sub-stories.

This is a good book.  It’s really well written and hard to put down.  The strongest takeaway for me was in the power of story as a guiding force for our lives.  A story provides meaning to our otherwise meaningless daily tasks.  If we see ourselves as a part of a story, our lives have direction.  We can make decisions based on how a car, house, or job fits into our story.  We can take risks in an effort to make our stories more interesting.  But more than anything we can live with a sense that our life has meaning and that we are participating in some grander meta-narrative bigger than ourselves.  It’s a good reminder, and it’s a fun book to read.  I highly recommend it.