Through Painted Deserts

“No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath. It’s a living book, this life. It folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over. 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 whisp of the story in your right….

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving & some coming home, some summer & some winter, some roses blooming like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside you, about learning to love a man or a woman, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends. About learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting, the climax, and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?”  -Don Miller.