And we feel it in our souls.

I really like Don Miller's books. A lot. Blue Like Jazz has been a favorite since, oh, high school. I've read it time and again, chewing on passages I underlined once upon a time and then underline more, sentences that strike a chord with me now that didn't back then. Especially that first paragraph - "I am early in my story, but I believe I will stretch out into eternity, and in Heaven I will reflect upon these early days, these days when it seemed God was down a dirt road, walking toward me. Years ago He was a swinging speck in the distance; now He is close enough I can hear His singing. Soon I will see the lines on His face" - sometimes I'll pick up my beat-up copy and read that over and over and over...

I like Don's style. He makes Jesus real to me in a new way, in a way I haven't thought of before (which, to me, is the purpose of God literature). He writes stuff and I nod a little and say, "Yeah. Yeah, that's right. You got it right, Don."

I recently finished Searching For God Knows What. It is my new favorite.

I was looking through the pages, trying to find a good quote for the blog. My original idea for this post was to have an image of the book cover and then have a really good quote written underneath, a quote that would make you sit and think about your life and how you feel about God. But there are too many good quotes. Quotes about God's love and how "the game" and "the lifeboat mentality" truly have no purpose in God's kingdom. Whole sections of the book completely captivate me. I had never previously thought about the story of the Garden of Eden in such realistic terms of humanity's epic failure, but while reading the first hundred pages of Searching, I sat there and thought about how Adam and Even were real, how they existed and had a relationship with God before sin, and how they broke God's heart in the worst way possible by eating from that freakin' tree.

Don takes a number of words to describe how the Fall signified the beginning of a war, a war between God and Satan, a war between Good and Evil. This is why it's so important to love everyone and not hate those who are different from us, hate things we don't understand but LOVE as Jesus loves, because "this battle we are in is a battle against the principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In war you shoot the enemy, not the hostage."

(Eph 6:12 has always been my all-time favorite verse. "For we struggle not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." The Message puts it nice and to the point: "This is no afternoon athletic contest that we'll walk away from and forget in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels.")

And so I propose a blog name change. Convictions are good. They often serve to keep us on the good path, but all of our struggles are deeper and more serious than that. They are more about God than that. I choose to try and go deeper. Because "for now, because of this act of war, relations have been strained. And we are feeling it in our souls."