Donald Miller

But love doesn__ control, and I suppose that__ why it__ the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we__e giving our heart to won__ break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don__ have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you__e rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that__ another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It__ the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.

If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.

You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.

I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

About the time I told God that He didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.

I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your 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.

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.