Don Miller (author)

"Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me."

"For a moment, sitting there in above the city, I imagined life outside narcissism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered at how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasures and attention. I wondered what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere I go being reminded of myself."

"I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity."

"Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror."

"I associated much of Christian doctrine with children's stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity."

"It took me a while to realize that these stories, while often used with children, are not at all children's stories. I think the devil has tricked us into thinking so much of biblical theology is a story fit for kids. How did we come to think the story of Noah's ark is appropriate for children? Can you imagine a children's book about Noah's ark complete with paintings of people gasping in gallons of water, mothers grasping their children while their bodies go flying down white-rapid rivers, the children's tiny heads being bashed against rocks or hung up in fallen trees? I don't think a children's book like that would sell many copies."

"Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all."

"The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious amounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into the dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment. Perhaps, I thought, Christian spirituality really was the difference between illusion and magic."

"Early on, I made the mistake of wanting spiritual feelings to endure and remain romantic. Like a new couple expecting to always feel in love, I operated my faith thinking God and I were going to walk around smelling flowers. When this didn't happen, I became confused."

"What was more frustrating than the loss of exhilaration was the return of my struggles with sin. I had become a Christian, so why did I still struggle with lust, greed, and envy? Why did I want to get drunk at parties or cheat on tests?"

"I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need."

"Because of sin, I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love things that kill me."

"My answer to this dilemma was self-discipline. I figured I could just make myself do good things, think good thoughts about other people, but that was no easier than walking up to a complete stranger and falling in love with them. I could go through the motions for a while, but sooner or later my heart would testify to its true love: darkness. Then I would get up and try again. The cycle was dehumanizing."

"Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled."

"I realized in and instant that I desired false gods because Jesus wouldn't jump through my hoops, and I realized that, like Tony, my faith was about image and ego, not about practicing spirituality."

"I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the idols of religiosity and philosophy."

"I feel like I am constantly saying things I don't mean. I tell people they should share their faith, but I don't feel like sharing my faith. I tell people that should be in the Word, but I am only in the Word because I have to teach the Word. I said to a guy the other day, 'God bless you.' What does that mean? I have been saying that stuff all my life, but what does it mean? Then I started thinking about all the crap I say. All the clichés, all the parroted slogans. I have become an infomercial for God, and I don't even use the product."

"I need more than a bedtime story, I need more than a youth group God.I am looking for a savior. A guide. An existential answer to my questions about purpose and meaning. I want true fulfillment in my Christian faith. I am looking for joy."

"The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart."

"I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer. This is why Paul had no questions. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisoned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen. He understood the rules of Rome could not save mankind, that mankind could not save itself; rather, it must be rescued, and he knew he was not in the promised land, but still in the desert, and like Joshua and Caleb he was shouting, "Follow me and trust God!""

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly, I don't care."

"And that's when I realized that believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is like making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."

"I was wondering the other day, why it is we turn pop figures into idols? I have a theory, of course. I think we have this need to be cool, that there is this undercurrent in society that says some people are cool and some people aren't. And it is very, very important that we are cool. So when we find somebody who is cool on television or on the radio, we associate ourselves with this person to feel valid ourselves. And the problem I have with this is that we rarely know what the person believes whom we are associating ourselves with. The problem with this is that it indicates there is less value in what people believe, what they stand for; it only matters that they are cool. In other words, who cares what I believe about life, I only care that I am cool. Because in the end, the undercurrent running through culture is not giving people value based upon what they believe and what they are doing to aid society, the undercurrent is deciding their value based upon whether of not they are cool."

"Satan, who I believe exists as much as I believe Jesus exists, wants us to believe meaningless things for meaningless reasons."

"But the trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them."

"Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don't even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe."

"The problem with Christian belief--I mean real Christian belief, the belief that there is a God and a devil and a heaven and a hell--is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe."

"If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you because they think you know something they don't, some clue to the meaning of the universe. Passion is tricky, though, because it can point to nothing just as easily as it points to something"

"Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline into a car without wheels."

"What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do."

"The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the power of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus."

"Here's a tip I've never used: I understand you can learn a great deal of girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little not inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring."

"The days and weeks before a true commitment to Jesus can be terrible and lonely. I think I was feeling bitter about the human experience. I never asked to be human. Nobody can to the womb and explained the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain. I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food, and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity. I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn't breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like and experience of freedom."

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless."

"Could we, with human reason, process the finality of death, we would be very different souls, giving more than we take, forgiving easily, and listening with all that is in us for the answers to questions we would not have otherwise asked."

"It gives me great confidence and pride to think that, had the Israelites been influenced by German engineering, Paul and Timothy might have journeyed in an old Volkswagen camping van."

"No poet, in his greatest imaginings, could conceive of anything greater than the real;"

"It does not escape me that I am blessed to be included in this tale of a billion human conflicts and singular resolution."

"Sometimes I think these self-righteous labors are attempts to impress myself rather than sincere strides toward God."

"This is a James Taylor moment and we are stuck with a piano player who wants to sound like Enya and a southern funk band that, somewhere along the line, fell into thinking Alabama is a sweet place to call home."

"There are two types of men in this world--one is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life."

"I guess I'm looking for what any guy is looking for. I want a companion, you know. Just someone to share life with. I want her to be my biggest fan and I want to be her biggest fan, too. I want us to raise kids in a home where they know their parents are in love with each other, with them, and with God. I guess that's all I want."

"You know what I want in a woman, Paul?" "What's that?" "A friend. A true friend; someone who knows me and loves me anyway. You know, like when I'm through putting my best foot forward, she's still there, still the same."

"Living with a woman is going to be really tough. They tend to be really domesticated, you know. They fold things and clean things and know what they are going to have for dinner several hours before it's time to eat."

"Outside of God's perspective, even romance loses its significance. Not in riches or in romance do we find fulfillment, but in God."

"The graves all are silent. The caskets are vacant. Stalin has no more wisdom for us. Nietzsche is preserved in books, having forgotten to lift his casket lid and tell us he was right. Muhammad gives us the slip. So does Buddha. It is Christ alone who defeats the grave. Nothing is left in the tomb but echoes and cobwebs. And so we do well to listen to Him with the ears of dying men."

"Angry people are stupid people."

"If worship is sustenance, then modern worship is fast food."

"Worship is not just something we feel, it is something we sweat."

"All this beauty makes a person realize how insignificant they are," Paul says. "How insignificant I am. You're the insignificant one" He grins real big as he realizes how his words sounded. "I didn't mean it like that," he chuckles. "No, I know what you meant, bud. I was just thinking kind of the same thing. I was looking at all this depth and it came to me how very shallow you are." "Ha, ha," Paul chortles. He takes a few steps down the trail and turns. "You know, Don, I was just looking at this little flowery cactus here and thinking how nice it looks and it made me realize how ugly you are." "Is that right," I say. "Well, I was just considering how smart these rocks look and it made me realize how dumb you are." With that I give him a little kick in the backside. "How smart these rocks are?" he heckles. "Well, I was just looking at that cloud up there, reflecting on its beauty and stuff, and it hit me how much you smell." "Is that right," I say. "The cloud made you realize that, huh?" Paul distances himself a little and keeps turning to see if I am going to kick him again. He's got this grin going like he got the last laugh. "You know, Paul, I was just looking at this pebble and it made me realize that I'm going to tackle you and throw you off the ledge." "I see. That's real deep, Don. The pebble; you got that from a pebble?"