Telling my Story

I had taken a hiatus from reading Donald Miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, but this morning I picked it up again. At the beginning of the book he talked about a friend named Bob who wrote down everything he remembered. Which I think is a great idea and I've been debating with myself if maybe I should start to do the same thing. I just read the chapter where Donald met Bob for the first time, and let me tell you, Bob and his family LIVE AN AMAZING STORY. I won't tell it to you because I think you all need to go read the book and find out for yourself. It's fantastic. Do you know what I thought though after I read it?

EPIC FAIL EMILY. Sitting at my desk, checking facebook, talking to a college friend on instant messenger, and reading a book. What kind of story is THAT???? Fail Emily, fail. So I'm back to thinking about my story. What kind of story is my life telling?

I SHOULD be Working on my Newsletter Article...

As the title of today's post says... I should be working on my article for our church newsletter The Lamplighter. Sigh. That's a fail. But in my defense, I was inspired for this blog while I was attempting at getting inspired for The Lamplighter. I was going through my favorite books (most of them written by the authors I mentioned in my last post) and looking through what I had underlined/highlighted to see if I could get any ideas. I got ideas... but my Lamplighter article needs to be much shorter than the ideas I had. Again... failing at writing my lamplighter article.

Anyways, I came across this quote in Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What and it really hit me today. "The greatest comfort I can feel in the middle of this is that Jesus did not lend Himself to war causes, to tax issues or political campaigns. For that matter, He did not lend Himself to raising money for education or stumping for affirmative action. It was as if He did not trust us to build a utopia. He kept it very simple, in fact. Follow me, He said. I have no opinion about what color the paint should be in this prison. Follow me."

My Story

Something to note about me. I love to read. I read ALL OF THE TIME. One of the nice things about not being in school anymore is that I have more opportunities to read the books that I want to read, vs. the ones that my teachers or professors tell me to read. Beyond the fiction books I read there are a few authors that I absolutely LOVE. They are my reference people and I feel as though I can trust the books they have written. When I buy one of their books I am confident that they will not disappoint me. I also need to actually buy these books usually because I end up making notes in them and highlighting and underlining all over them. These authors are: Rob Bell , Brian McLaren,  Brennan Manning, Donald Miller, and  Shane Claiborne. These are my references. When I feel like I need to be inspired for something, I usually turn to these guys. I wish that someday I could have them all meet together in a room and I could pick their brains. It would be incredibly interesting, they would have fantastic stories to tell, and we would probably laugh a lot. 


So if you are reading this blog, I'm probably going to reference these authors a lot. (Along with some fiction writers too, but I won't have you worry about them right now.)


Yesterday I picked up Donald Millers new book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and I'm about halfway through it. (I really really fast by the way.) What he's talking about in this book is living out a story, your life story. Some movie guys came up to Don and said that they wanted to make a movie out of his book Blue Like Jazz. While creating the screenplay for the movie Don realizes that his life is actually too boring to be a movie. So he has to create new things for the plot so that it can translate to the movie screen from the book. Through this process he realizes that he is not living a good story.

The God Question

One of my favorite authors is Brian McLaren. I love his ideas and his writing style. It's so interesting and what I love about him is that he really challenges how I think. Some of my other favorites usually I can agree with pretty easily. What makes Brian McLaren unique is that what he says sometimes I respond with "I never thought of it that way before" or "I'm not sure I agree with that" or "Right on" or I simply am speechless cause I don't know how to respond.

He has a new book called A New Kind of Christianity and he has been doing some videos about the questions he addresses in the book. This video is about "The God Question."

Hopefully I can post that video correctly so you all can see it.

Silence

 I'm reading a book called Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus. If you follow me on Twitter or are my friend on Facebook you might notice that on occasion I'll quote the book on my status. The book defines contemplative as "be in the temple. It means to rest in the temple or presence of God." One of the things I am appreciating about this book is that the author (Mark Yaconelli) has you go through different exercises so that you can truly understand what he is talking about in the book. The chapters today were especially difficult for me because they required me to be in silence and simply be in the presence of God. So I left my office and decided to hide out in the activities center for a little while so no one could distract me. I needed to focus on seeing first, then hearing, then what my body was feeling, and then simply on God.

That was hard.

But it made me think of Junior year at Concordia when I experience silence once... and I wanted to share.