Reflections from 2009

I'm currently reading Don Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. It's a wonderful look into his own life and what it means to live a life worthy of a great story. I'll save the overview and critique for another time, but I will share an excerpt of a difficult breakup Miller experienced.

We were both passionate and strong-willed people, and this became our undoing. I won't go into details, because they are the same as a million other romantic disasters. Essentially, though, it felt like the Tower of Babel had been planted between us, because for no lack of effort, once we started arguing, we could no longer communicate our basic needs. Each failed attempt to talk things out became a wall between us, skin thick, so every conversation had the resonance of talking to yourself (190-191).

He says a little bit later concerning getting well over the suffering:

I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy (198).

The book is HARDLY about relationships and breakups and the politics of the playground, but I nonetheless connected in a strange way with the excerpt. I connected with it, because it seemed as if Don Miller reached into my heart and stole those words from me. ;) But the story did not elicit a public breakdown. Call me crazy, but I think a half-smile crept up on my face, as if to say "ha...that sounds vaguely familiar. Have I read this before?"

In short, I guess all I want to say is that time is a funny thing. Perhaps it's time to embrace my struggles/insecurities/shortcomings as part of a larger story. Perhaps this year I will trust God to, as Miller says, "guide me through a better story" (91).

PS, I think it is a WONDERFUL book, and very fitting to read at the start of 2010, a year full of new challenges and adventures.

PPS, hope I'm not too much of a downer today; this is the first time (since August) I've come across something (including my own disjointed thoughts, ha) that adequately expresses what happened. Then again, hindsight is 20/20...
(: