A Few Words from Donald Miller

I'm almost finished reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and I've got to say, it's an incredible book. I plan on recommending it just as soon as I'm done with it.

I just read an interesting chapter on loving others, and a few things really stuck out to me as I went. Don talks about how he and some friends spent a month working at a ranch in Oregon. While they were there, they lived out in the woods, forsaking material things and living on faith that God would keep them well. There were a bunch of hippies that were living there at the time too. They were formally educated hippies that believed in free love and acceptance. Don said that they introduced him to what loving others was all about.

Here's the passage I found most interesting:

Because I grew up in the safe cocoon of big-Christianity, I came to believe that anything outside the church was filled with darkness and unlove. I remember, one Sunday evening, sitting in the pew as a child listening to the pastor read from articles in the newspaper. He took an entire hour to flip through the paper reading about all the gory murders and rapes and burglaries, and after each article he would sigh and say, Friends, it is a bad, bad world out there. And things are only getting worse. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined there were, outside the church, people so purely lovely as the ones I met in the woods. And yet my hippie friends were not at all close to believing that Christ was the Son of God.

This did not confuse me so much as it surprised me. Until this point, the majority of my friends had been Christians. In fact nearly all of them had been Christians. I was amazed to find, outside the church, genuine affection being shared, affection that seemed, well, authentic in comparison to the sort of love I had known within the church. I was even more amazed when I realized I preferred, in fact, the company of the hippies to the company of Christians. It isn't that I didn't love my Christian friends or that they didn't love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don't know, more real, more true. I realize that is a provocative statement, but I only felt I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself my Christian friends. My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don't cuss and don't support Democrats and don't ask tough questions about the Bible.