So, I’ve been negligent on posting about this book. It’s great and worth the read. In Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he basically tells his own story of reviewing his own life as a series of stories, but not necessarily as “a” story.

It is easy to live from moment to moment, rising up on the occasion.  Miller is suggesting that wholeness is found in the integrity of living within all the moments. Real stories, he learned, require characters who suffer and overcome.

In the end, our stories are not best told about what we have experienced as much as in hard choices that have been made.  Miller suggests that if it won’t work in a story, it won’t work in life.  He encourages the reader to examine their whole life as a well constructed narrative. “Once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice.  Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it’s not natural to want to die.”

I also recently read The Audacity to Win, written by David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama’s primary and general election victories in 2008.  Politics aside, one does have to take note of a campaign that became a movement rewriting the rules and expectations of the game.

In telling of the preparations for the Iowa caucuses, Plouffe acknowledges the servant leadership example of Paul Tewes who “established a motto for our field staff philosophy. ‘Respect. Empower. Include.’  We wanted to be the nicest, most attentive, and most creative staff in the field.” Contrary to the methods of most national races experienced locally, volunteers were not treated as if they were to serve the professionals in headquarters, but “in many ways, they would be the embodiment of the campaigns.

Finally, I pulled Horizons & Hopes: The Future of Religious Education off my shelf recently.  One story in there has my attention:

There was this artist marooned on an island for years.  Her prized possession was a sculpture that she had created by collecting bits of metal found on the island.  In the process of shaping the work she had grown in her understanding of the sculpting process, of herself as an artist and a person, and of the way in which art gives expression to beauty and truth. Although she is very proud of her creation, she also realizes that she has grown beyond it – both as an artist and as a person. She is confident that her new work of art will express new depth and challenge her even further in her work and her life.

So she goes in search of more metal. She scours the island and is disappointed to discover that there is no more metal to be found. She realizes that she can only give expression to her new insights, her new creative movement, by melting down and remolding the first creation.

How does the story end?  However it ends does say something about the artist, does it not?