Beautifully Stated

We had book club on Friday and did something I can't believe we just thought of now, picked books for the entire year.  Created a year's worth of valuable learning and rich reading.  The book slated for November is A Million Years in a Thousand Miles: How I Learned to Live a Better Story by Donald Miller and I have to admit, it was my pick so I have a head start on it. 

 

I chose it after reading a few chapters; the words had me at the core right from the start. 

 

"...remembered Uncle Art and thought about him standing at his father's grave.  I knew he wouldn't die, because his life was like the roots of a tree that went miles into the soil and miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character.  I didn't think you could kill a tree that big.  Not even God could kill a tree that big." 

 

"The thing about death is it reminds you the story we are telling has finality." 

 

"If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.  But my uncle died too soon." 

 

"I wondered if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place.  I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally." 

 

 

So beautifully stated.  I can't add much.  Other than to say my really great friend sat across from me and clearly articulated, "Amy...your story does not end with this." 

 

How true she spoke that day because I write my story, it does not get written for me.  And I want to have the life with roots which go for miles into the soil and come up in the people who I'm doing this big thing with.  To know it's story which yes, has an ending point because ours all do, but goes on and on despite of an end. 

 

There's a part in the book where a man named Ben who resides in the warm city of Nashville experiences snow with the author standing next to him and oh love a duck, it hits...

 

"He watched the snow as though there was writing on each flake and he was trying to read.  He watched each flake as if it were the only one, and they all fell like feathers.  He gave us permission to notice how remarkable it was, water frozen and falling from the sky, all the cars stopped and the buses stopped, people out taking pictures of their dogs jumping through the snow." 

 

To notice how remarkable it was. 

 

Let's all give ourselves permission to notice.  To notice it all.  To create a really worthwhile story.