More Don

Don Miller. I cannot get enough of this man. I've finished the last book of his I hadn't read yet, Through Painted Deserts, and now what do I do? Start back over with Blue Like Jazz?

This book was the most fun of the others. Well, I'll just say it was less theological. In a nutshell, it's his recalling a road trip he and a friend made in a Volkswagen van from Houston to Portland. It made me want to go camping. Can you believe I've never gone camping before? Well, I've stayed at one of those camp places, in a bunk in a cabin, and did the whole canoeing and roasting marshmallows over a campfire thing, but I haven't gone bona fide, sleep in a tent outside camping. I've never purposely watched the sunrise. Can you believe it? I'm not saying I've never seen it rise. Of course I have. But I've never purposely gotten up before dawn, gone outside, found a spot to get a good view and sat down to watch the sun rise.

Reading this book made me jealous. It really did. There are worlds completely untapped by me. There is so much of which I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. This book made me want to forget this routine life, just scrap it all, become a nomad, and find God out in the wilderness, on the road. Reading this book made me want to plug my ears to the same old, same old, clap, clap, clap, turn to your neighbor and say blah-blah-blah, come on and get excited everybody stuff. Reading this book made me want to marvel in the why, it made me want to be content with just knowing that God is good. It made me want to kick my obsession with the how in the rear end. Bffff! There it goes, flying out the window.

Here's a paragraph just as he ends the book. He's sitting with his road trip buddy, watching the sun rise over the mountains:

It is a wonder that those exposed to such beauty forfeit the great questions in the face of this miraculous evidence. I think again about this small period of grace, and thank God for it, that if only for a season, I could feel the why of life, see it in the metaphor of light, in the endlessness of the cosmos, in the miracle of friendship. And had these mountains the ability to reason, perhaps they would contemplate the beauty of humanity, and praise God for the miracle that each of us is, ponder the majesty of God and the wonder of man in one bewildering context.

I want to be able to just be content with awe. To not understand God or myself, but to be able to be okay with that. I think there's something about nature, God's creation, that helps us do that. Today I sat outside for a while. Under a tree, on a blanket, reading and journaling in the shade at my favorite park. It's a manicured bit of nature, nothing like Don's roughing it through the Grand Canyon, but it's still beautiful. For minutes at a time, I would stop reading or writing to drink in my surroundings. I would stop and breathe and feel alive and, for a few minutes, forget about the swirling trivia that unduly hogs my brain. I need to do that more often, I think.