Donald Miller's A Thousand Years

For this memoir assignment, I selected the novel A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story by Donald Miller. Donald Miller is an non-fiction American author who displays his focus on the struggles of Christian spirituality though primarily his own life. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years begins with a phone call and subsequent visit from two guys, Steve and Ben, who want to help Don turn his first book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. As the deal begins to take shape, the writers approach Donald with a problem. “Your life is boring,” Steve tells Donald (Miller 25). Donald is told that if people were to watch a movie where the book was directly transferred to the screen, “I think they’d stab each other in the necks

Miller realized along the way of writing this book that overcoming conflict is what produces joy and satisfaction. Miller states:

“You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’ve lived a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through until its end” (Miller

In other words, the more difficult the end is to attain, the better the story. I agree with Miller that much of life is about the person you are molded into on the way to the goal. It’s about character transformation, and not settling for less than the best person you can become. Yet with this in mind, I believe it is important to know that living a better story and overcoming hardship is not going to be a smooth ride. Suffering and difficulty may give you the chance to grow as an individual but it seems to always be easier said than done. Miller says “people like to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.” (Miller 100) What is true is that we become the stories we choose to live out. As a result, in light of conflict there are always opportunities to give up trying to achieve your best. Therefore we have the ability to choose how we shape ourselves: “We may begin by playing a role, but pretty soon we are living out the character of the role we’ve chosen to play in our stories” (Miller