Million Miles

Every life is a story, a collection of events compiled chronologically one on top of the other, culminating in either an emotionally filled, fulfilled ending or a half-hearted, half-lived death.

...at least, that's what Donald Miller suggests in his excellent new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. After reading it, I am inclined to agree.

As usual, Miller's writing style is that of a meandering journeyman, a tapestry of writ woven with his standard brand of personal accounts, anecdotes, and life-lessons. Something is different about this book, though, something that moved me personally.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is not a book about self-aggrandizement or self-deprecation. It is not a book of self-explication or self-innovation. Instead, Million Miles is a book about excavated hope, an appeal to the cynical masse to leave behind its boring, pedestrian life to embrace one of ambition and fulfillment.

Life, lived with others, for others, and through others, is the only answer to our human condition, posits Miller. Through God for humankind, human persons can experience a better than the American way of life, a more authentic, un-surreal life, a content, honest life.

Million Miles is perhaps Miller's finest work. Any and every person that has the ability to read should in fact do so; I find it highly unlikely that if one were to sit down with such a finely moving story, that they would be unmoved. My encounter with the book has certainly left me better and I can only conclude that it can achieve the same positive result in the lives of others as well.