Sweat and inspirational music

I don't finish a lot of the nonfiction books that I read. Sometimes the title alone is enough to inspire me, but usually after about 3-4 chapters, I think, "Yes, yes, I get it." However, this weekend I finished Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. His math isn't very good, but his writing captivates me. This book is about the concept of story. Here's an excerpt:

Before I learned about story, I was becoming a fatalist. I was starting to believe you couldn't feel meaning in life because there wasn't any meaning to be found. But I don't believe that anymore. It's a shame, because you can make good money being a writer and a fatalist. Nietzsche did it with relative success. Not personal success, mind you, because he rarely got out of bed. But he's huge with twenty-something intellectuals. He's the Justin Timberlake of depressed Germans, and there are a lot of depressed Germans.

One time the team I was on was preparing to go to a conference where Donald Miller was a speaker. I said that I was excited to hear him, and my coworker scrunched up his face as if something smelled bad and shook his head. "Donald Miller is not my favorite," he said. A year later, that coworker was found to have been living a horrible double life of sin and church leadership. I don't know if I really like Miller anymore because of that story, or if it is just symbolic in my head of "real Christians" and the fake ones.

My daughter and I went to a modeling audition on Saturday, and it was a wonderful experience. They told us that everyone is called to do something: if singing or acting or modeling is a tool God has given you in your tool belt, use it to get the job done. If it is some other career, go and do what God has made you to do, go do your part in His Kingdom. The head scout told us to have no fear in the audition. Be yourself; give it everything you have. If you bomb, make sure you bomb big.

The modeling audition and Miller's book are both about living awake, about living a good story. About facing fear and taking risk and staying the course even when it's hard. This morning, I considered, "What if I just gave up on church?" Other people have done it, been hurt and run away for years, sometimes their entire lives. But I don't want to be THAT character in the story. I want to be the one who hangs on through the pain, the sadness, and all the things that don't make sense and find hope, some wisdom, and a new start.

When you watch a movie about a character training for some really difficult goal (like Rocky), they show that character working and sweating while music plays, always something inspiring. During those scenes, I, being a realist, think how much work that prep really is, and we're just glossing over it for a good story. That said, the work entitles you to be the main character. The Story may gloss over the hard, tedious parts of your life, but those times earn you the story worth telling. No one wants to watch someone at the Olympics who gave up and stopped training.

I don't know what is in store for my family in the future, but I think I am going to listen for the soundtrack of inspiring music that I know is playing in some cosmic background.