Donald miller quotes

There's a genius part of you that wants to create. That part of you wants to talk to God. Get out of the way.

I loved the fact that it wasn't my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God's, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.

Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.

It's not what people do that scares me. It's what they hide. It's the secrets that keep us from bonding and create distrust. If we were more willing to accept each other's depravity we'd be more united, we'd be more honest. If you hide two things from me, I'll assume you're hiding a million. And I'll keep you at a distance. I'm not afraid of the evil in you. It's in me too.

At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.

I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.

I think that's the true litmus test for someone who has become closer to Jesus: their heart is more loving, accepting, childlike, less believing that they have all the answers and more believing in Him.

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.

What we really need is somebody who loves us so much we don’t worry about death, or about [anything for that matter]… We need this; we need this so we can love other people purely and not for selfish gain, we need this so we can see everybody as equals, we need this so our relationships can be sincere, we need this so we can stop kicking ourselves around, we need this so we can lose all self-awareness and find ourselves for the first time, not by realizing some dream, but by being told who we are by the only Being who has the authority to know, by that I mean the Creator.

Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.

Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

If we knew how much God loved us and was for us, we’d talk to Him all day long.

It is no coincidence that Jesus talks endlessly about love. Free love. Unconditional love.

Every day you live is a page. Every year, a chapter. Your life, a book. What is it about?

I am early in my story, but I believe I will stretch out into eternity, and in heaven I will reflect upon these early days, these days when it seemed God was down a dirt road, walking toward me. Years ago He was a swinging speck in the distance; now He is close enough I can hear His singing. Soon I will see the lines on His face.

Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.

All the trees are losing their leaves, and not one of them is worried.

You can't tell a good story without conflict - the story can't be beautiful or meaningful. We're taught to run from conflict, and it's robbing us of some really good stories.

Our lives have a countdown clock that we can't see. Mine reminds me to only do work that matters.

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.

Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.

We don't think much about how our love stories will affect the world, but they do. Children learn what's worth living for and what's worth dying for by the stories they watch us live. I want to teach our children how to get scary close, and more, how to be brave. I want to teach them that love is worth what it costs.

I think the best thing a person can do is to read through the Gospels in the Bible and really look at Jesus, because if a person does this, they will realize that the Jesus they learned about in Sunday school or the Jesus they hear jokes about or the skinny, Gandhi Jesus that exists in their imaginations isn't anything like the real Jesus at all.

What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do. I used to say that I believed it was important to tell people about Jesus, but I never did. A friend kindly explained that if I do not introduce people to Jesus, then I don't believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn't matter what I say. We live for what we believe.

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.

The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.

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.

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 dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.

I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime.

All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.

Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives.

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.

Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.

Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

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.

I heard once that real love doesn't ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else's pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that's great, but that isn't what you did it for.

It is when people do not allow God to show up through them ... that the world collapses in on itself.

The words 'alone,' 'lonely,' and 'loneliness' are three of the most powerful words in the English language. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Without a positive male role model in your life it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society.

Self-discipline will never make us feel righteous or clean; accepting God's love will.

The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love.

How disappointing would it be get to heaven and find out God created life to be enjoyed while all we did was worry?

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

...I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.

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.

I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit.

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.

Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe.

Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

Here's the truth about telling stories with your life. It's going to sound like a great idea, and you're going to get excited about it, and then when it comes time to do the work, you're not going to want to do it. It's like that with writing books, and it's like that with life. People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

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.

I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing.

To be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people. That is why God tells us so many times to love each other.

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts

I want to start replacing my “fix” response with an “enjoy” response and just let people be themselves.

If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn't important it will be easy.

If you don't feel free and be yourself, you can't connect. Find people who accept your quirks. They'll heal your soul.

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.

I think life is staggering and we're just too used to it.

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 there are some other guys who do believe in God and they 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.

I have sometimes wondered if the greatest desire of man is to be known and loved anyway.

I think each of us can, through our writing, discover our super power

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

Telling the truth is the slow, mundane, difficult route to a meaningful life. Anything else is cheating.

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.

Great stories move through fear.

I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.

If honesty is the key to intimacy, it means we don't have to be perfect and we don't have to pretend to be perfect.

I don't know why it is, exactly, but the people with the healthiest self-esteem, are also the greatest at intimacy. I'm not talking about arrogant people. I'm talking about people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

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.

Let's show up to life. Let's prove how beautiful it can really be. Let's face the conflict, redeem it, conquer it, and allow it to mold our character. Let's participate in what God is doing in the world.

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

The more I try to impress people, the more I separate myself from them. Vulnerability attracts love.

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, sit down with myself and explain that things were going to be okay, that everybody loses ground sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the way life works. This is hard to understand in the moment. You get to thinking about the girl who rejected you, the job you got fired from, the test you failed, and you lose sight of the big picture — the fact that life has a beautiful way of remaking itself every few weeks.

Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn't diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can't explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me. But it wasn't like that with Jesus.

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 … the great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear.

It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things.

God made a whole beautiful earth and decided to put you in it, to experience all of this beauty. You can't do that watching television all the time.

I think Jesus is saying, Look, you guys are running around like monkeys trying to get people to clap, but people are fallen, they are separated from God, so they have no idea what is good or bad, worthy to be judged or set free, beautiful or ugly to begin with. Why not get your glory from God? Why not accept your feelings of redemption because of His pleasure in you, not the fickle and empty favor of man? And only then will you know who you are, and only then will you have true, uninhibited relationships with others.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

The times in my life when I have been most happy haven't been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I've been in love or in community or right with people.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

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.

Lets choose to do something really difficult, something that saves lives, and let's do that thing with people we love.

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.

Don't let go of your strength or your beauty. It was given to you by God.

I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.

The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a life meaningful either.

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere.

Most great art is created when the artist feels they are channeling something rather than trying to communicate something.

And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.

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 could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

If you want to bond with your friends, do something very hard with them, something that you won't be able to do alone.

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or get better.

...I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.

We don't think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to your imperfections.

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

It’s interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It’s as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help.

For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.

If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, “Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”