In a new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller takes this concept and uses it to offer a wonderful challenge within which each of us is invited to edit our own life so as to make our story a better and more noble one.
He does this through a series of autobiographical essays within which he challenges himself to write a better story with his own life and then invites his readers to each edit our own lives so as to build a story which is more interesting and more noble, one which, like a great movie, will leave its audience in tears and longing to do better things with their lives when the final credits roll...
God reveals. God demands. We are stunned and confused. The “miracle” of the encounter is not in any physical manifestation that initiates the encounter, but it is in “the conversion of my way of looking at things….” We are changed and see possibilities for ourselves and others that we could not have even guessed at before. We are exposed to “the possibility of the impossible,” in the phrase Marion uses over and over, and a whole new adventure is launched.
In her biography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how, shortly after her conversion to Catholicism, she went through a painful, desert time. She had just given birth to her daughter and her decision to have the child baptized, coupled with her profession of faith, meant the end of her relationship with a man she deeply loved. She suddenly found herself alone.
Prudence Crandall may sound like the name of a character in a Jane Austen novel, but she was a real-life force of nature in 19th century New England. Crandall started a boarding school for girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, impassioned to raise educated women. One day, she received an application from a young African American girl named Sarah Harris. Crandall admitted Harris, creating the first integrated classroom in the United States.
As Crandall accepted more and more students of color into her school, more and more white parents pulled their children out. Local merchants refused to do business with the African American students, and the townspeople ostracized them and plotted to pass laws that made their education difficult or impossible.
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are
normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual
texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these
resources.)
("Years ago, the priest, doctor, and psychotherapist Anne Townsend wrote a little book that was a blessing to many. It was entitled Prayer without Pretending. Anne Townsend argued that when we pray, we should tell the truth. In our prayers, we should say how it is...")
