#14 Thing I Love: Blue Like Jazz

Blue Like Jazz is a book on Christian spirituality by Donald Miller. Normally, I wouldn't really be interested in something like this. I don't necessarily like authors who preach, and hearing about conservative ways of looking at Christianity. I purchased the book a few years ago because I heard of it's motivation that it provided Renee, the girl behind my favorite organization To Write Love on Her Arms.

I bought the book with full intention to see what the hype was all about. Naturally, school and other things got in the way, so I never got around to it. This past summer I was convinced to read it, finish it, and enjoy it. Yes, I was going to force myself to enjoy it.

Little did I know that this book wasn't just a preacher forcing spirituality down your throat. It's a man with struggles, and doubts. He has friends with problems. He has vices and issues that make him human. A humble writer who has really lived life to the fullest. A man who loves Jesus.

He doesn't really tell what his denomination is, but he intelligently goes through his faith and really examines it.

Miller does so with humor and stories of his own life, that make the reader really relate to him and connect their own faith with the stories and experiences he and his friends have had.

It didn't really take me long to finish reading Blue Like Jazz. I enjoyed the way he spoke about being a Christian, and I really identified with it. I never thought I'd enjoy a book that talks about faith in such depth. I was fascinated with his ideas, insights, and the way that he immersed himself in a culture of opening up and really discussing the bottom line of his faith.

Some of my favorite quotes:

"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."

""I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music. "

" I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.
God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."

""Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe."

"Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more."

"The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me."

"Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him."

-Catherine