I’ve had a crush on Donald Miller ever since I read Blue Like Jazz when I was fourteen; he’s taught me a good portion about how I look at life. I certainly can’t say that he is the only person from whom I draw inspiration, but he is apparently the base from which I am building this very first blog post.
Reading that book was the first time that I realized just how messy and beautiful the Gospel is. I’d been saved for ten years prior, but this helped me to really and truly put the whole thing into perspective. I learned that loving Christ is about pursuing holiness because He is holy; not self-righteousness because I am prideful. I suppose it helped that I read this book at the beginning of my high school career when I was thrust, for the first time, into a public school environment and had to learn what Christianity in the real world looked like.
See, here’s the thing, I have this deep feeling that God has been preparing me towards a different calling for a long, long time. When I read Blue Like Jazz and learned that the Gospel is for real and messy individuals, not just perfect and put-together people, I no longer had this fear of people who don’t know John 3:16 and the pledge to the AWANA flag by heart. Rather, I started seeking out people who didn’t know either of those things; people whose lives and pasts were messy and needed a little (actually, a whole bunch) of Jesus to tidy up a bit.
Until recently I could think of nothing to do with my life outside of Youth Ministry. While I adore Youth Min with every thing that is a part of me, over the last several months I have felt less and less like that is the thing that I am meant for, that I was ultimately made for.
A couple of weeks ago I was getting ready for work and listening to a sermon by Mark Driscoll called “Jesus and Religion” out of his Luke series. In it he talks about the people that Jesus hung out with. See, Jesus hung out with the self-righteous and the seemingly put-together people, but He also hung out with, even pursued, the messy people who had rough pasts and presents. He would hang out with them and just love them. Through His perfect holiness, He would hang out with these people and draw them to Him.
That’s what I want to do. That’s who I want to be. I want to be holy because Jesus is holy, and I want to hang out with the people who are messy. And I don’t want to just hang out with them, I want to live life with them and love them like Jesus did so that they can see who He is.
Something that Don (we’re not actually on a first name basis, I just like to think we are) also taught me was how to write a good story. In his most recent book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he explained to me as I rode along on the train that life needs to be lived like it’s a story. Then he reminded me that the only way to write a great story is to do so through Christ, and with a little bit of whimsy.
“I asked Bob what was the key to living such a great story, and Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea that he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy. I asked him what he meant by whimsy, and he struggled to define it. He said that it’s that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks” (167).
So that’s it. That’s my first, and absurdly long, blog post. I have no idea if I will stick to a theme or topic or eventually work up to every post involving unicorns (which the more I consider it, the more likely it becomes). Probably, though, what will happen is I will just write to talk about the curious story that I am living and that God is writing.
