Why Donald Miller Works

I just started reading A Million Miles in A Thousand Years. The buzz on this book is incredible. I already knew I'd be reading it; I'm a huge Donald Miller fan. I fell in love with him a few years ago - like every Christian metrosexual, emergent church planter, and red-blooded housewife in America - after reading Blue Like Jazz. I only read it because Leida made me. And by "made me," I mean she gave me a copy for my birthday. I read it because it exists in print. Don't let any paper with words anywhere near me or I will read it. Bind it and give it to me for a gift and I'll even eat it for breakfast. I love to read books.

But I didn't really want to read it. I was skeptical. Don came along soon after my respite from Protestantism in the Orthodox Church. I was suspicious of his post-modernity and the fact that so many post-moderns loved what he had to say. I don't know if that was the right way to feel, but I'm a student of psychology, so I am now more interested in what my fear says about me.

Well, I loved Blue Like Jazz, and I loved Donald Miller. I loved walking with Don inside his eyes and listening to his heart pound. He has that way, doesn't he? You feel like you are inside him. It's really courageous how he invites us to ride his stream of consciousness. We get to climb into his Iron Man suit and fly around his world for awhile. The way he sees it, it is a beautifully heartbreaking but triumphantly hopeful world. It's a great ride.

I have a few of his other books too. I was very stirred by reading Searching for God Knows What. To Own A Dragon particularly moved me because I never imagined that the experience of abandonment by his father would so closely mirror my experience of being abandoned by my mother. I didn't expect that.

Now I am two chapters into A Million Miles, and I am already convinced that this is his magnum opus. I've never read such an unconceited memoirist. He is so evocative yet unassuming. And this time, he's funny. Like, really funny. He uses humor in all of his writing, but this one has me laughing out loud. I am hooked. Not just hooked on the story but hooked on him.

Because here's why Donald Miller works: as a character in his own story, he is honest and vulnerable. When we are honest and vulnerable, we open a relationship to intimacy. The two necessary elements of a growing and deepening relationship are honesty and vulnerability.

It's inspiring, really, for a writer like me. I read him and I am motivated to write my own story. I'm really pissed that I haven't done it already because now, I'm too late. Not that it's too late to write my story, but it's too late to get it out there before the million other people who will now write their own story because of this book. Now I will be just like everyone else, and you know how I hate that.

I've wanted to write my story since I could put pencil to paper. In first grade, I won a Young Authors award for my story of a little girl who was in the circus and wanted to be a little trapeze artist because she wanted to be like that beautiful woman who wore the sparkly outfits and walked on the air. She asked the woman if she could be a trapeze artist too and the woman said yes and the woman adopted the little girl and made her a little trapeze artist. And they performed in the circus together, the little trapeze artist and her new mother.

Even then, I was trying to write my story.

But, like every writer, I am convinced I am not a good writer. I let it all get in the way. There are already too many books full of writers' introspective naval gazing, so I'll spare you my excuses. The truth is I am afraid. I am afraid you won't read what I write, and if you do read it, you won't like it, and that will mean you don't like me. Now that a guy like Donald Miller is on the scene, the fear is even worse, because we don't just like the way he writes. We like him. The way I write is similarly personal. If no one reads me, does this mean no one likes me? What's worse, if they do read me, does this mean they really won't like me?

It's true that he is a master storyteller, a painter of words. It's a rare gift, his, to connect the way he does. But he connects because he is honest and vulnerable. In his honesty and vulnerability, we connect with him because his opening makes us open to him, and then we see ourselves. I am not a man. I did not grow up without a father. I have never been to Portland, and I have never made out with a girl, but whenever I read him, I see me. And I see a bit more of God. And it works.