I'm six chapters into Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and I'm quite enjoying it. It's a little different from his previous efforts. For one, it doesn't seem to be as dense, which is tricky because you want to feel like you're getting your money's worth. At the same time, Miller seems to have honed his writing skills. While he comes off as a little more self-deprecating than usual, he also turns his phrases really well.

One paragraph struck me as interesting this afternoon. In class recently, we've been talking about the problem of evil as it relates to the Christian faith. Miller brings the topic up in a roundabout way: he looks at viewing life as a story and God as the Great Storyteller. I like the image, mind you. It can, if you're not careful, make God sound like a glorified Shakespeare and we glorified players on a predetermined stage. Miller has a nice moment, though, when he says:

I was watching the news the other night, and they were still covering that story in Mumbai about the terrorists who went on a shooting rampage. The man on the news said that before the terrorists killed the Jews in the Jewish center, they tortured them. I had to turn off the television, because I could see the torture in my head the way they were describing it. I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

Definitely something to think about, if only to remind ourselves of the weight of the war that we wage each day, even when it feels like we're not fighting much of anything at all.