Life, Conflict, Story

Truly, I will answer eventually the questions about this second adoption. I just haven't exactly been sure how to yet. And in the meantime, I'm reading the new book by Don Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, a book about story. I'm finding that the thoughts here relate remarkably to our family right now. I'm only 60 pages in and have cried four times already.

Between envious thoughts popping into my head every other page, wishing I could write as well as Mr. Miller, my mind is being blown by the simple ideas presented about life and story. After Rich Mullins died in a car accident in 1997, I listened to his Jesus Demos over and over, the music he'd been working on before the tragedy. One line in particular became a driving force in my life: "Jesus, write me into your story, whisper it to me, and let me know I'm yours." I think in the muddle of life, I've lost a lot of the wonder that comes in knowing that there's a bigger story we can be a part of, if we allow it. Allowing it involves risk. It involves danger and obstacles and being uncomfortable for long stretches. I'm not so much a fan of any of those things. As it's explained in the book, the essence of story is "A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it." Key word: conflict.

So this is the stuff currently on my mind, about life, about our family, about this next adoption. I'm going to keep reading and keep mulling over all this. In the meantime, I'll leave you with two of the passages from A Million Miles that have made me cry:

"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."

Can an artsy-crafty friend please stencil this onto the walls of our children's rooms?

And finally:

"I wonder if that's what we'll do with God when we are through with all this, if he'll show us around heaven, all the light coming in through windows a thousand miles away, all the fields sweeping down to a couple of chairs under a tree, in a field outside the city. And we'll sit and tell him our stories, and he'll smile and tell us what they mean.
I just hope I have something interesting to say."