Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller

Like "The Shack," this book is a must-read. Miller, a Portlander, shares passionately and convincingly that our faith needs to be woven into our daily life choices if it will ever be seen as real by the rest of the world. And since my life-pace has again picked up, I am going to take the easy way out for this "book report" and just select some favorite quotes from the book to whet your appetite to read it for yourself.

"...I imagined life outside of narcissism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered at how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasure and attention. I wondered what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere I go being reminded of myself....Nothing is going to change in the Congo until you and I figure out what is wrong with the person in the mirror."

"...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. There were people He loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved,which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans. There were others, regular people, but He didn't play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself. That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn't show partiality, which every human does."

"There is something quite beautiful about the Grand Canyon at night. 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.)"

"Can you imagine if Christians actually believed that God was trying to rescue us from the pit of our own self-addiction? ... Can you imagine what Americans would do if they understood over half the world was living in poverty? Do you think they would change the way they live, the products they purchase, and the politicians they elect? If we believed the right things, the true things, there wouldn't be very many problems on earth. But the trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything."

"Andrew is the one who taught me that 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. Andrew very kindly explained that if I do not introduce people to Jesus, they I don't believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn't matter what i say."

"...you begin to think the world belongs to you. You begin to think all space is your space and all time is your time. It is like in that movie 'About a Boy' where (the) chief character...believes that life is a play about himself, that all other characters are only acting minor roles in a story that centers around him. My life felt like that. Life was a story about me because I was in every scene. In fact, I was the only one in every scene. I was everywhere I went. If somebody walked into my scene, it would frustrate me because they were disrupting the general theme of the play, namely my comfort or glory."

To be continued...