It’s a cold night, and the house is quiet. Sometimes, in moments like this, the sound of the appliances in the kitchen, the wind whirling outside the windows, and the traffic on the street at the bottom of the hill my house is on work in a strange unison and make it sound like it’s raining. Typing on a computer keyboard can sound like rain sometimes too, depending how heavy your fingers are, and how much they lift from the keys before you place them on new ones. I just finished Don Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.” It’s a really good read I recommend to anyone. It’s a narrative wherein Miller spends much time analyzing the elements of story (conflict, inciting incident, crossing, tragedy, going through conflict to obtain something,etc) and how they reflect real life. I bring that up because, like it has been while reading most of his books, I was forced to scrutinize my own life and ask myself a difficult question: Is my life a story worth telling (or reading)? I have to be honest with myself in answering, and say it is often not. I’m very normal in a lot of ways. No good story would talk about the white walls in my house, or the frozen chicken nuggets in my fridge. It might mention that I have a relatively exciting job, with more juicy drama than it’s worth sometimes; Or that I’ve got a retarded cat who sits on the coffee table directly in front of me every night staring in my direction while I’m watching TV. Honestly though, when I look at my life, there are boring moments, yes, perhaps more than I’m proud of, but the most valuable of times are rooted in the people around me. I could not be emphatic enough about how much my friends spur me on to love and good works. They are the kind of people who are trying to speak good stories into nothing, who are trying to make something of living in a suburb, and who are trying to include other people in the story.
A good example would be how a group of my closest friends started an organization that is notorious for hosting guerrilla art shows and concerts in random venues and places throughout Santa Clarita, a city where family finger painting and cover bands dominate the art scene. Another great example would be a different friend, who is learning that he’s got an exceptional ability to listen, and who can sit for hours with me over coffee, letting my loose lips sink ships ad infinitum only to nod his head at the end of it (the end of infinitum?…oops) to acknowledge he sincerely heard me, he loves me, and he cares about what I had to say. A different friend works with High School kids so they don’t go down some of the roads she did.
The truth is I could go on and on, but I’m writing because I feel compelled to acknowledge that I think God can make mundane stories worth something, that I think He’s doing that with me, with my friends, with the things we are part of together. At the same time, I’m making an effort to live my own life more purposefully, more calculatedly. A group of us have started meeting once a week with the purpose, essentially, of living our lives more intentionally in the best way we feel possible. It’s amazing how, when this starts happening, there can be so much pleasure in little things like frozen chicken nuggets, white walls, and retarded cats.
I end with Don Miller:
“I don’t wonder anymore what I’ll tell God when I go to heaven, when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city…I’ll tell God [my story] and he’ll laugh, I think, and he’ll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorites. We’ll sit and remember my story together, and then he’ll stand and put his arms around me and say, ‘Well done,’and that he liked my story. And my soul won’t be thirsty anymore.”
a density of soul 
Posted on October 21, 2009
0