Through Painted Deserts

::reading:: through painted deserts, by donald miller
Previously titled: Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance

"I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

"Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems...

"...so, soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up...

"And so my prayer is that your sotry will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman, or a man, about learning to love a child...about learning to love others more than we love ourselves...

"We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?"

-excerpts from the Author's Note.
Miller, Donald. Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road. Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2005.