The Point of Life is Transformation
Pain & Suffering – the ego likes to avoid as much of this as it can, unless, of course, our identity is one who suffers. Every time I encounter a person asking for spare change, I wonder how much change they really want in their life. How much “change” do any of us really want? How much change can God spare, probably a lot. How much can we endure, probably a lot less than opportunity offers.
I read A Million Miles in a Thousand Days by Donald Miller yesterday on a flight home from San Francisco.
We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren’t capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake up slowly to everything… God is slowly turning the lights on… The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn’t that big of a deal, that life isn’t staggering… We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given – it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm, just another child born, just another funeral.
This is a wonderful book for all kinds of reasons. I think it is one of the best self-help books ever written because it isn’t so much giving you advice on how to change as it is a revelation on how change is possible – and how it is possible to reawaken to the glory of life and get out of a life that is dull, boring, normal and familiar to the point of being inert.
In a way, it reminded me of Michael Crichton’s book Travels.Crichton, too, talked about how pain, difficulty, struggle, suffering and confronting the known limits of ourselves is the crucible for transformation.
As Donald Miller says:
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
A Million Miles in a Thousand Days – take the journey.