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If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.
Donald Miller -
I think that every living person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group thinking, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there, the problem is the needy beast of a thing living in my chest.
Donald Miller
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I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.
Donald Miller -
I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.
Donald Miller -
I am human because God made me. I experience suffering and temptation because mankind chose to follow Satan. God is reaching out to me to rescue me. I am learning to trust Him, learning to live by His precepts that I might be preserved.
Donald Miller -
The very scary thing about religion, to me, is that people actually believe God is who they think He is.
Donald Miller -
I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.
Donald Miller -
When you fly across the country in an airplane the country seems vast; but it isn't vast. It's all connected by roads one can ride a bike down. If you watch the news and there's a tragedy at a house in Kansas, that guy's driveway connects with yours, and you'd be surprised by how few roads it takes to get there.
Donald Miller
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The heart responds to the conflict within a story.
Donald Miller -
If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.
Donald Miller -
When I started studying the issue and issues related to fatherlessness, I realized I had all of them. Fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, poor work ethic, just stuff that you don't have when you don't have a man in your life to look you in the eye and say, "You're good," or "Good job."
Donald Miller -
Moral #1: "If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life." Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
Donald Miller -
The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That's a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.
Donald Miller -
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is 'Do not fear.' It's in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn't let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
Donald Miller
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We don't naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren't good.
Donald Miller -
The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.
Donald Miller -
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
Donald Miller -
If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.
Donald Miller -
And there is something profoundly humbling about knowing God. I’m not talking about the trinket God or the genie-in-a-lamp God. I mean the God who invented the tree in my front yard, the beauty of my sweetheart, the taste of a blueberry, the violence of a river at flood. There are a lot of religious trends that would have us controlling God, telling us that if we do this that and the other, God will jump through our hoops like a monkey. But this other God, this real God, is awesome and strong, all-encompassing and passionate, and for reasons I will never understand, he wants to father us.
Donald Miller -
When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.
Donald Miller
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I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.
Donald Miller -
She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.
Donald Miller -
The real voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom.
Donald Miller -
Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
Donald Miller