Externally Focused at Watermark

I just finished reading, Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life.” If you read “Blue Like Jazz,” you’ll find the style familiar.   In it, Miller writes about being contacted by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his life. During the process of re-writing his life for film, Miller realizes that his life has been boring and meandering and begins the work of “editing” his actual life into a better story. He challenges us to reconsider our “story” and the things that we’re striving for.

He challenges us to be intentional about making sure that our lives are not simply a string of random meaningless experiences, but to do the hard work of choosing a meaningful life, stiff arming a life of ease and comfort, and being intentional about building relationships.  Life is about overcoming our fears and being transformed and how, if we submit to our fear, we can easily look back at a “boring” life.  Here’s one of my favorite quotes from pp. 154-55:

“And I found myself wanting even better stories. And that’s the thing you’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end.”

Praying that we would grab hold of every opportunity and boldly proclaim the good news that will lead us out of a life without meaning and into a life of full and complete abundance! John 10:10