Written by John Mark Adkison
“Sometimes I feel as though I were born in a circus, come out of my mother’s womb like a man from a cannon, pitched toward the ceiling of the tent, all the doctors and nurses clapping in delight from the grandstands…My body falls back toward earth, the ground coming up quick, the center ring growing enormous beneath my falling weight. And this is precisely when it occurs to me that there is no net. As I wonder…Who is going to rescue me?”
And thus begins Donald Miller’s “Searching for God Knows What,” a radical book on freeing Jesus from a formulaic, rigid religion and how God is not merely our safety net, but the one who fires off the canon.
Donald Milleris not your average Christian author. In fact, Miller is about as odd and crazy-minded as writers come. He is not your grandmother’s sort of Christian-literature writer, unless your grandmother happens to be a bearded lady who can identify with Miller’s carnival-style parables. His first novel “Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance”, came out in 2000, but was met with little success. Luckily for him, his next novel,“Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality”, launched him into the New York Times best-seller list, which put him on the express lane out of anonymity. His next book to hit the scene was “Searching for God Knows What,” released in 2004.
Many may be wondering why someone would write a review on a book five years old and has probably long been on the paperback shelf at Barnes & Nobles. Well, that writer would reply that a review is still necessary for the simple fact that not enough people have read this book. “Searching for God Knows What” is something new and exciting for young, Christian students to delve into after reading long, boorish text books.Instead of debating which disciple wrote that gospel or what this prophet meant by that prophecy, Miller dares to ask the question: “What if the Gospel of Jesus was not ‘safe’ at all, but full of intrigue, passion−and romance?”
Not only does Miller try to take Jesus out of the box, he drenches the box in gasoline and lights it on fire afterwards.
Now what exactly is this “box”? The “box” is a set of limitations or formulas humans bind God to in order to make him fit comfortably into their nicely organized, daily scheduled lives. The box can be a formula that goes like this: a person struggles with life, some sort of calamity happens in this person’s life, and that calamity brings this person to Jesus. The end result is this person living happily ever after. It is the idea that coming to Christ is a step-by-step process taken out of the self-help book known as the Bible.
Yet, we all know life is actually a large collection of unknown variables waiting to happen at random.
“It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was,” wrote Miller.
Finding God is not like following a step-by-step instruction manual, it’s like falling in love. It is the tale of boy meets God.
Miller in no sense attacks the institution of the church or how it tries to help bring in converts. He is trying to get Christians to stop viewing God as a cuddly Santa Clause they can fit into their daily planners and see Him as an unpredictable being who wants his children to live outside their comfort boxes.
“I didn’t have a relationship with God; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right,” he wrote on page 31.
To say Miller’s writing is “whimsical” would be nothing short of an under-statement. He writes with a dry sense of humor skilled in sending the reader into hysterics, making the reading both entertaining and enthralling. His ideas are quirky and very original, for example chapter seven is titled “Adam, Eve, and the Alien: How the Fall Makes You Feel” and chapter 14 is “The Gospel of Jesus: Why William Shakespeare Was a Prophet.”
One of the most attractive aspects to his writing is the simple fact that Miller seems to write whatever pops into his head, and somehow brings these thoughts together to create a new way of looking at Christianity through an entirely different lens. However, this lens can often turn into a mind-whirling kaleidoscope as Miller is apt to lose you somewhere along his train of thought. Sometimes his ideas are so strange and random; you have trouble connecting the dots.
Yet, what really adds to the quality of this book is the genuineness the reader can sense in Miller’s writing. He does not pretend to be an all-knowing guru with the true secrets to following God. He is just one eccentric man amongst a sea of people trying their hardest not to be eccentric, while trying to make heads and tails of this art form called Christianity.
Follow Donald Miller on his blog athttp://donmilleris.com/
