Disclaimer: I purchased it myself. It was not provided to me for review.
In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller documents his journey of rewriting his first successful memoir for screen. He realizes along the way that he had the power to rewrite his own journey into a story. Not just a mundane story, but a story with purpose. As he learns what makes a great story for a movie he begins to rewrite his own story, the story he’s living. Living a pretty ordinary life, Miller decides to take himself out of his comfort zone.
From hiking in a foreign country to riding his bike across the U.S. he changes his own story. Thankfully for us he shares his thoughts about that journey. I’ve shared my favorite passage before, but let me share it again. I highly recommend A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
“We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren’t capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn’t stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on……The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering. What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it…….
When Steve, Ben and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. 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 beautfy of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you……
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 acknowledgement. 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 rather than grateful participants.” — exerted from pg. 58 -59 of A Millions Miles in a Thousand Years.
