From Donald Miller’s “Through Painted Deserts”

“You feel like life is always leading up to something, but it isn’t. I mean life is just life. It’s all happening right now, and we aren’t going to be any more complete a month from now than we are now.”

“It’s funny how you think you need soemthing but you really don’t. I mean I remember feeling like if I didn’t have ths girl I was going to die. But I am not dead, and I feel fine, and I think half the time when I like some girl I am really looking for some kind of redemption, some kind of feeling that I matter or am valuable or am needed, and I don’t think there is a problem with that, but it just makes you realize how much we use each other sometimes. I heard once that real love doesn’t ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody’s else’s pack, lessen his load, and it it gets reciprocated, that’s great, but that isn’t what you did it for.”

“It seems to me that life would be better if we could just let go of the thought we need more and more stuff to be happy, more and more of the approval of others.”

“Life is a dance toward God, I begin to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign. I begin to think about my time at the canyon in these terms, as learning to dance in a new way, the first few lessons had me feeling clunky and awkward, but soon they will give way to a new kind of graceful sway, and I won’t stop at gift shops or hunt for a television, but like [my friend] Paul I will be able to stand over a pot of boiling beans for hours and feel completely content, as though there was nothing in life that I was missing out on. It gives me joy to think about things this way…And I think to myself, There is nothing I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God.”