I (Heart) Don Miller

It’s finally happened. I’ve fallen head over heels, completely, deeply, in love. I have developed a seriously passionate literary attachment to Donald Miller. Yes, Donald Miller. Of Blue Like Jazz fame.

I inhaled his book Searching for God Knows What a week or so ago, and I was inspired by another avid reader/blogger to read To Own a Dragon, a book Miller wrote about growing up without a father. I devoured it like it was Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake ice cream with a graham cracker ribbon. And if you know me, you'd know that means a lot. I also picked up his book Through Painted Deserts, a chronicle of his road trip from Houston to Portland, which I’m sure I’ll down in similar fashion.

There is something mesmerizing, raw, and alive about the way he writes. It grabs something deep inside of me that makes my gut ache with recognition. I know that pain. I know that doubt. I know that insecurity. I know that revelation. His writing makes me tear up with yearning. I want to find my place in His story. I’m tired of checking boxes—I really want to know Him. I want true relationship. I want to fall in love with Him. He always cautions against tearing the poetic out of the spiritual. I don't want to reduce it to a formula.

There is something so sexy about a well-read man who has a way with words. Not just well-read, not just a way with words, but gutsy and honest. Earthy and sensitive at the same time. The fact that the subject at hand is God-centered is important too. One who probes the theological to try to come to an understanding rather than one who flatly and patly belts it out as though he’s got it all figured out is also attractive. But not just attractive, it’s real. And I don’t even know Don Miller for real. Yet, I’m smitten.

Perhaps, weirdly, I, the indecisive, ever-fickle me, am coming to a slow realization of what I really want. What really and truly matters to me. It’s not Don Miller per se. But maybe the tip of the iceberg is that it’s the essence of him, of what he’s passionate about, that so unwaveringly draws me in.