HO Week 3 (9/9) - Calling

[We're reading Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and the prompt was to write about a scene of our life depicting a single memory]

Life as a Movie

June 22, 2003—I remember the day well. It was a Sunday morning unlike any of the past 36 Sunday mornings. That morning, I walked through the doors of my home church for the first time in nine months. {I had not been there while my family and I lived in China.}

There was one thing I wanted to do more than anything else – see my best friend, who had promised to email me every day and had faithfully done so. Glimpsing her walking in the hallway, I moved to intercept her. Evidently she had seen me when I saw her, because she had rushed into the auditorium just as I slipped out. She chased me down and we reunited in a joyful hug there in the hallway.

I can still see it in my mind’s eye – I can still remember my almost euphoric happiness that things had finally reached a conclusion – I can still point to the exact spot where it happened. There have been times since when the building has been deserted that I have returned to the spot and relived that moment. For me, it brought the saga of my Chinese experience full circle. Now, at last, I felt truly home.

Those feelings are what make the moment stick in my mind. The relationship and kinship I felt with my friend are what gave those brief moments poignancy. There was a period of time, however, when the memory was bittersweet – when the happiness of the time was dulled by the regret of the present.

A couple years after our reunion, my friend and I had pretty much gone our separate ways. We still saw each other, but I no longer counted her as a close friend. Just this summer, thanks to her initiation, we finally reconnected on a deep level. Suddenly, I again feel that close bond I felt with her so long ago, and I am thankful. It’s a reminder that things don’t always stay the way they are…but that I shouldn’t give up easily on something good either.

Questions about Chapters 1-10:

1. On page 7, Miller says "You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience." What do you think of this theologically? I just heard something else like this today...maybe in Integrated Theology...about how God became incarnated to share our experience of life with us.

2. "Without story, experience are just random," Steve tells Don (27). Later, Miller talks about a man who changed his daughter's heart towards him through story. "He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family" (51). We clearly don't want our lives to be meaningless, but to what extent should we try to plan/map out the story of our lives? How does God fit into this picture?