leaf puddles and airplane stars

i haven't talked much about reading here, but i spend a lot of time doing it. i love to read. and i just finished a book that really impacted me and the way i am starting to view my life.

actually i wasn't even planning on reading this book - it wasn't on my radar at all. now i had seen it on ali's blog at the beginning of the year but it wasn't a blog post specifically about the book. she mentioned it in the context of her one little word for 2010. you can read her post here.

fast forward to a week or so ago...i'm in my local barnes & noble looking for another book and i walk past a table in one of the aisle's in the store. i happen to look down and there is the book i saw on ali's blog. i was suprised that it was on a table labelled "spirituality/religion" so i picked it up, read the back and decided to purchase it. boy am i glad i did.



A Million Miles In A Thousand Years
by Donald Miller

this book is about a guy who has an opportunity to write a movie. this gets him thinking about his own life and the stories he's living. he takes the chance to edit his life into a great story and explains the meaning of the little stories we live in context with The Story. the stories we live define who we are and the good news is that we (for the most part) control the stories we choose to live. it is a great read!

it is my habit to highlight passages that i really like or that speak to me when i'm reading a book. needless to say i highlighted a lot in this one! some of my favorite passages are listed below as today's ten things thursday post. if any of them spark your interest, i encourage you to get this book.

1. "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."

2. "So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer. I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences I could live through."

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

4. "I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the people around us that life just isn't worth living".

5. "The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want".

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

7. "As real-life protagonists we can control only what we do and say, what choices we make, what words we say. The rest is up to fate".

8. "The thing about writing a story, in real life and on paper, is half the effort is just figuring out what the story is going to be".

9. "the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree...[I] asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it meant to be a tree in that story".

10. "The point of the story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle".