Live from the Million Miles Tour!

Greetings from the road.  I am traveling with Don Miller on his “Million Miles” tour.  We started off doing a dozen shows in a dozen days in a dozen cities (and 2 countries!).  It felt like we traveled a million miles in the first fortnight.

I couldn’t be happier. Well except that my dear husband Larry only got to come the first two weeks.  And my hometown show in Hollywood was hard. Wow, tough crowd. My friend Tony said I was terrific, I’m just being hard on myself.  But they also say a prophet is not welcome in his/her own town. Portland was rough on Don, but he says it’s because his mom was there.  See?

The Million Miles Tour

Don is out promoting his new book, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, and I’m the warm-up act (aka, The Dangleberry). Opening for Don is like opening for U2. Don hates that analogy, so I offered to change it to, “it’s like opening for Flock of Seagulls.” He relented.

Blue Like Jazz hit a nerve amongst younger Christians who didn’t fit in with their parents’ yuppie American Christianity; not to mention many Yuppie American Christian parents who finally realized the Yuppie American Christian Dream was a bucket of dookie.

I am not knocking honest, biblical Christianity; but rather the pretty, shiny Churchianity where all questions are answered, every conflict ends in an altar call, and y’all live your Best Life Now. Anyone else out there for whom that did not happen? Upside down on a bad mortgage? Out of work? Kids hate you? Spouse depressed? You depressed? Remember the catch-phrase, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” Wondering what kind of alternate universe in which this life is called “wonderful?”

That’s what both Don and I are talking about on the “Million Miles” tour. The big story God calls you to live actually involves conflict, trauma, and soul-searing character change. Call it the “The Feel-Good, Escapist Tour of 2009.” Before you go running for your Prozac, just have a listen.

My book, Angry Conversations With God, begins when I hit forty and found myself loveless, jobless, and living over a garage. When a friend said my relationship with God was like a marriage, I decided to take God to marriage counseling. Of course the God that showed up for counseling was my twisted version of the real God. Over time God did change – into the real God. And man, the real God read me the riot act: if this was a marriage, I had married Him for his money – for what I could get out of him. Psyche! I had to learn to love God for better or worse; for richer or poorer, for fun and for free. I did not go quietly. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. All those disappointments and heartbreaks became the tools God used to mature me into someone who could recognize and enjoy all the good he really had for me.

Don’s book goes a step further. When filmmaker Steve Taylor approached Don to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz, Steve said Don’s real life was too boring. Don and Steve went to Robert McKee’s story structure seminar and learned the basics of storytelling. Don had an epiphany in that seminar: the same elements that make a good movie make a good life. A main character overcomes conflict to reach his goal. Further, the main character has to be someone we care about, and his goal has to be something big enough that we care, and something important enough that if he doesn’t accomplish his goal, people will die, lives will be ruined, hearts broken. We have to want this character to achieve that goal!

Personally, I would add that if the main character’s goal is a bad one, we pray he doesn’t get what he wants, but that his goals are shattered and he learns to want better things. Think of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. He wants to stay out of the war and punish Ingrid Bergman for breaking his heart. Eventually he realizes he needs to help Ingrid and her husband escape Casablanca and rejoin the resistance movement. Thank God Bogart didn’t get what he wanted but rather what he needed.

Don’s book reflects on how editing his life for a movie called him to live a bigger story. He went on a bike trip to raise money to drill wells in Africa. He pursued a girl fully. His goals didn’t always end happily. But he led a big life, and became a bigger person for it. Don’s message: God wants you to live a big story: a beautiful story that involves peril, conflict, and great stakes. That is a life worth living.

The first time I heard Don speak about this, a huge burden of guilt fell off me: if my life wasn’t easy at the moment, it wasn’t necessarily that I was screwing up; it was because life is hard and conflict is part of the story. And conflict is okay: whether it’s thrust upon you or you even cause it, God can take what you give him and work with that.

And you know? It was a feel-good moment; and not an escapist moment. It was a moment I was ennobled to step into the conflict and work through it to live a bigger story.

Every time I hear Don give this message on the tour, every time I see someone take his book home, I know they too will be challenged to live a better, more beautiful story than to simply own a Volvo or a beige condo somewhere.

We are traveling to another 60 cities all over the country. Come watch me do a segment of my solo show based Angry Conversations With God. Listen to Don talk about how Don dared to live a bigger story in A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. I bet you will leave energized and excited to live the bit story God has for you.

For more info about the tour, go to http://amillionmiles.com

Follow us on twitter: @donmilleris and @susanisaacs

Join Donald Miller on Steve Brown Etc. on October 16th.