*Thoughts on Blue Like Jazz & More
This book really appealed to me because when I was in high school I could classify my beliefs as Deism. I believed in something greater than myself, but I struggled with understanding how this higher power was in my everyday life. Miller’s stories about people he knew who showed love and had a zeal for life but were still missing something really resonates with me. I used to wonder why I always felt I needed more from life, I wanted to believe God was there for me every day. The people around me who had their church life and their spiritual life separate influenced me greatly, I thought that is was what real spirituality looked like. Donald Miller helped me to see spirituality in a different light, a genuine and authentic light. Overall, I was able to mentally take down the ideals I presumed I had to have to be a Christian in today’s Christian community.
My senior year of high school is when I started to experience a genuine desire to be close with the Lord; and when I started to believe and have faith he is there in my every day. This came through studying the book/devotional A Call to Die and reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. This was in the fall of 2015/spring of 2016, and now I am still learning so much. Partiality within the Christian community has been something I really struggle with understanding, and has caused me to question a lot of hearts and motives. At least from my perspective the American Church community today seems so backwards.
Still today, I can honestly say I struggle with having faith. My entire life is focused on the rest of my life. Because I am hardwired like this I struggle with accepting everything will be okay if I let go and trust the Lord will lead me down the right paths at the right time. I normally leave very little to chance. Not that faith is chance, but sometimes it can feel like it. No matter how many times I see the Lord bless me or those around me, my natural tendency is to be entirely too introspective. This leads me mentally down a god-less and more man controlled path. I must make sure I am spending time with the Lord regularly, sitting and reading my bible, praying, or meditating on truth, this is vital for my brain and my soul to connect and be on the same page with my faith in the Lord.
Miller was able to take the reader down a path that ultimately points out everything we do is our choice, it is up to us, we are our own responsibility, including how we treat and react to people. Now I do not believe in religion of any form and I believe in spirituality whole heartedly. But, if I had to pick a religion to define me, I would want it to be loving Jesus and loving people.
I could write about each chapter and how it changed my life, or tell you about how each chapter I read convicted me in a certain way that lined up with what the Lord was speaking to me about that day. But I won’t do that because I would then write my first novel. I will share with you my favorite line from the book: (pg.49) “I wanted God to help me care about other people because that’s all I wanted to do, but I wasn’t any good at it”.
Before I stated if I had a religion, I would want it to be loving Jesus and loving people. I think this is where the American church has failed people. To do the latter you must focus on the former. When a person truly desires to know and to be like Jesus their heart is naturally seeking to love His people. Jesus’ ministry on this earth was focused on everyone- the rich, the poor, the needy, the competent, even those he knew would deny him, he loved and continued speaking truth to them. If I was a person who followed a religion I would not be required to love everyone daily, I would not be required to love unconditionally, or to forgive seventy times seven times; but I would be required to give gifts or sacrifices to be forgiven for the week, or to make a pilgrimage to reach the holiest of holy status. I’m glad I am not religious.
I do believe in spirituality, I believe I want to follow the only man who walked this earth that loved people to the end, and resurrection of his life. I want to devote my life to sharing with others about this man, and that he loves you, too. This only comes from a place that has been restored and strengthened through one of the greatest gifts from the Lord, grace. There is grace for the Maggie that didn’t believe the Lord is real today. There’s grace for the Maggie that didn’t have faith and thought the world was meant to be experienced through the darkness, and somehow that is how I would be cultured, or how I would become wise.
I think there is no better way to spend my life than trying to love in the radical way that Jesus did. Being with and walking through life with everyone, those who, love the same Jesus, and those who detest him. I want to take whatever version of life I get and meet it with the pure heart the Lord has given me. In the Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer he discussed the internal burdens we carry- pride (the labor of self-love), the burden of pretense (looking to always put our best foot forward and hide from the world our inward poverty), and lastly, the burden of artificiality. These burdens cause us to separate our lives into the sacred part and the secular. Our artificiality creates a persona that lives in our workplace and one that lives in the church. I think it’s pretty hard to construct and continuously manage two different personas that have two different sets of values.
Stemming from these ideas, Tozer then makes a statement “Today the trend in conservative circles is back toward that bondage again. It is said that a horse after it has been led out of a burning building will sometimes by a strange obstinacy break loose from it’s rescuer and dash back into the building again to perish in flame. By some such stubborn tendency toward error Fundamentalism in our day is moving back toward spiritual slavery.”
We as Christians live as if we don’t know we have been saved and healed, as if we still must keep up our defense to protect ourselves from the world, instead of diving in as healed people to point others back to Christ. We are too comfortable with our Christian communities to reach out and live among those who we are called to reach.
To me, I felt every time Miller allowed his heart to be softened, he gained the eyes of the Lord, the Lord’s perspective and how he sees people. Each humbling moment, each time he walked a friend through truth, each time a friend walked him through truth, each time he chased his desire, when he fell, when he succeeded, these things led Miller to the same answer to who God is and how we are supposed to live as believers: focused on other people. Of course, our desires matter, but when they line up with what we have been created for, we are still serving other people. People matter, they are all that matter. Community matters, but more than those immediate people, those outside of our preferred circle are where the heart of the Lord is. Jesus had his disciples, but he trained them to reach those on the outside of their circle.
Every time I finished reading a chapter, whether it was about faith, serving people, partiality, loving your future spouse, morality, or even Tony Soprano- I felt the urgency to live with the focus off myself. The only way to get closer to the Lord, to really find myself, and to genuinely love others is to live my life with less of me. I just hear the phrase repeating in my mind throughout the day, especially when something is hard, it comes as a sweet whisper- less of me. This is the key and the only way to live with the true desire to know and serve God- through serving others. This is the only way to live a happy life with a pure heart.
Blue Like Jazz left me with hope that there are more people who really want to live this way, that is isn’t a fantasy I only hoped existed- there are human beings who really desire to love Jesus and people. One time I met with my mentor and expressed that I felt this deep emptiness inside, even when I had been pursuing a relationship with God. I felt a desire for a community, or even a few friends that really wanted to live their lives preferring others and living as I felt the Lord called us too. Now a year later, I have met a small group, even the Race can feel isolating. Everyone has their own perception of what our lives with the Lord is supposed to look like, and what the bible is supposed to look like lived out.
I think the reason for feeling isolated here is because there is still a missing piece that is beyond physical acts of serving. That is perception, people who are serving can forget to lay down their own perception of people and take on the Lord’s eyes for his people. A crucial part of Miller’s point is, it doesn’t stop at a routine of reaching others, or after you’ve served at the soup kitchen. This is only where it begins, I think Jesus wants us to seek to understand other people and to see how they see life.
I thought Christians were supposed to be different, in how they try to pure heartedly prefer others. This means trying to understand how people experience everything differently, that is why genuine connection can be so rare. But what I am trying to say is, to try to see life from someone else’s life is the key to caring for them, to care for what they care for. We ask God to break our heart for what breaks his, to give us his eyes to see, but it seems to stop at asking. I think people physically choose others, but to lay down for a while how we think life should be seen is scary. It leaves us vulnerable and in a land we cannot control. This is where the Lord calls us, and where faith plays a role that leads us to authentically connect with people in this bridge of human connection. If we all just tried to get here, and to love here, people would begin to understand each other, if we could just leave ourselves behind sometimes.
