[A report]
So, as part of the sweet program I am a part of with Thomas Nelson Publishers, I get the great opportunity to read books and write reviews on them. In return, I get the books for free. This book review is particularly special, in that I received Donald Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years before it was released to the public. Not only that, but they also included a second copy for me to give away to someone else, and so it was given to my fellow student ministries staff and the student ministries director at my church.

Honestly, I thought this book was amazing. It hit very much at home for me since I have been working on defining my life a lot over the past year, and working on making good changes. I haven’t read any of Donald Miller’s other books, but this one makes me want to go back and read them all.

The premise of A Million Miles is that your life is a story, and is your story actually interesting? Don give a ton of examples from his life regarding how he had been living his life and just letting it pass him by, until a movie producer and writer contact him and want to turn one of his previous books into a movie. Through this process, he learns that life is a story, and your story can either be boring or it can be exciting, full of great chapters and awesome adventures. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you how Don changes his life based on this, but you definitely need to read it and find out, and it may give you a ton of insight into changes you need to make in your life to make your story more interesting.

One of the parts that struck me the most is when Don comes home and looks around his house, and it’s like no one lives there. He says his house looked like a stage on which fake props had been set. There are no pictures of anything anywhere in the house. Nothing that shows a story that he was living, with chapters from amazing events in his life. It’s basically like he wasn’t living a story at all, or it was so boring that there was nothing to display from it. This hit home for me as I sat reading this in my living room, and I looked around, and realized that I didn’t have a whole lot of pictures or mementos as well. I wasn’t living a story.

Don’s writing is very conversational in this book, and it is a great way to tell his story. At times he’s depreciating of himself, all of it making for a great vehicle for this book. I’ve taken what’s been said in this book to heart. It’s not meant to be a self-help book in any manner, and I don’t think it’s written in that way, but it does greatly make you think about how you’re living your life and if it’s worthwhile, or boring and pointless. I highly recommend you go out and pick up this book and read it. It will at least make you think…

What’s Your Story?