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Emotions.

I remember this one time I was sitting in front of the TV in the dark crying with a glass of water in my hand. I laughed as I cried because I realized that the light of the TV made the clear water in the amber glass look a lot like scotch.

I really don’t drink.

I especially don’t drink scotch.

So I sipped my water and sat with what I felt. Anger. Loss. Sadness. I wept and I understood it was uncomfortable and temporary.

Sometimes stuff happens. Stuff you don’t want. Stuff that makes your heart throb and your soul ache. Stuff that makes you shake your head and clench a fist and sit in front of the TV in the dark crying with a glass of water.

And this is the sort of stuff that makes you feel a lot of things. Things like anger and loss and sadness. Things that are uncomfortable and temporary.

But the thing about these things is that they are necessary.

They are two kinds of necessary.

First, they are inevitable. If you have a heart that beats, you will feel them at some point.

Second, if you never feel them again, you will never feel their opposites again. You can’t avoid anger, loss and sadness and not avoid things like joy and hope and affection. You can’t numb anger, loss and sadness and not numb things like joy and hope and affection.

You feel them all or you avoid them all.

You feel them all or you numb them all.

And I think that night while I cried and other nights there was part of me that wished what I felt wasn’t so. But I also think there is a part of me that thanks God I feel those things when I feel them. Because that I feel them means I have felt their opposites.

And I think that’s worth it.

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Books in 2012: Blue Like Jazz

Five years ago, my friends Seth and Sarah separately suggested, one within weeks of the other, that I read a book called Blue Like Jazz. So after work one night, I walked to my car from the now-closed Carrollwood bureau, drove to the bookstore down the street and bought a copy.

I read it.

I liked it.

I didn’t touch it again until this year.

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality is by Donald Miller, and it’s also a movie, as of this year. It played at one Tampa theater for a weekend and I missed it. So in lieu of seeing it on the big screen, I pulled my copy off the bookshelf in my closet.

I flipped through it and found it devoid of notes, but dogeared at the bottom on lots of pages, like I do every time I like what a particular page has to say. As of tonight, Blue Like Jazz is the fourteenth book I’ve read in full in 2012. I liked it better the second time. Frankly, it felt like I hadn’t read it before, like it was wholly new to me, which goes to show how much attention I must have paid it in 2007. Most of the pages I dogeared the first time meant nothing to me this time. But lots of things did mean something to me. Here are some:

On souls unwatched:

“It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn’t make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.” -page 18

On self absorption:

“‘I’m talking about self absorption. If you think about it, the human race is pretty self-absorbed. Racism might be the symptom of a greater disease. What I mean is, as a human, I am flawed in that it is difficult for me to consider others before myself. If feels like I have to fight against this force, this current within me that, more often than not, wants to avoid serious issues and please myself, buy things for myself, feed myself, entertain myself, and all of that. All I’m saying is that if we, as a species, could fix our self-absorption, we could end a lot of pain in the world.'” -pages 40-41

I’m with Don:


“Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and I honestly don’t care.” -page 103

On belief:


“But the trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because carries responsibility, and if I actually believe those things, I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything.” -page 107

“…what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.” -page 110

On boldness:


“I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know form personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn’t into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.” -page 142

From an excerpt of a play Don wrote; lines a husband says to his wife while she sleeps:


“That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in doing so, revealing Him.” -page 149

“God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.” -page 150

On death to self:


“Bill set down his coffee and looked me in the eye. ‘Don,’ he said. ‘If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.'” -page 185

On understanding:


“Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.” -page 202

On responsibility:


“I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.” -page 221

– – – – –

Click here to read about all the books I read in 2012.

Click here to read Don Miller’s blog.

Click here to learn more about Blue Like Jazz.

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Cell phone shopping.

Friday night, I stopped at my cell phone service provider’s store, with plans to purchase a new phone.

“Something better than this,” I said.

I held my flip phone up for the store manager, who had greeted me upon my walking into the store.

“Anything’s better than that,” said the manager, who — using an iPad or comparable tablet — sent my name to the next available salesperson, and smirked.

I laughed, and recited the list of what I want and don’t in a phone.

“Preferably one that doesn’t flip open, but I’m flexible,” I said. “I don’t text. And I don’t want a phone that requires a data plan.”

“Follow me,” he said.

We wandered through a maze of displays to the “Basic Phones” kiosk at the center of the store.

“You can pick any of these,” he said.

I had my pick…

of exactly six phones.

Only one of them sturdy, none of them sleek, and none for under a hundred bucks. Of fifty phones in the store (give or take), the folks who refuse to use the internet on phones are forced to choose from six crappy options.

In truth, I am part of an overwhelmingly outnumbered minority for my age and country. We, the phone users who only use phones as phones and whose phones are routinely mocked by salespeople in cell phone stores, can’t expect the cell phone world to cater to us. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting a little to know my options are forever limited. I think we’ve reached a point at which basic phone users are largely coerced into switching to smart phones, not just for their apps and their looks but their quality. And I wonder whether we’ll eventually reach a day on which my options cease to exist, when “cell phone” and “smart phone” are synonymous, after the demand for basic phones is so small manufacturers stop creating them.

I shudder at the thought. (Click here if you don’t already know why.)

So Friday night, I left the cell phone store empty handed.

I’m keeping my good, old fashioned flip phone.

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Stop stealing this from your employer.

While there is something magical about working where at the end of the day you find a flattened biscuit stuck to the bottom of your slip resistant shoe, rising to the top of the fried chicken industry was never my dream.

Fried foods was a day job, or, as implied by author Jon Acuff, a fundraiser for my dream job. Acuff’s book Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job is the thirteenth book I’ve read in full in 2012. And a lot of what he wrote was a reminder of what it was like for the writer in me to work at Popeyes Chicken.

My couple years behind the fast food counter were not glamorous. I spent a lot of the end of high school smelling and looking like my job was to repeatedly plunge into a dunk tank of chicken grease. I also had to clean public toilets and clean up after people who don’t understand the trash can concept. But despite that and the scar I think I still have from the time I pulled the fries out of the fryer with haste, I would never trade what I got out of working at Popeyes.

At Popeyes, I didn’t get to do my dream (write, speak, counsel, change the world). But as Acuff points out in Quitter, I got to practice stuff I’ll have to be good at when I am livin’ the dream. Lunch and dinner rushes taught me hustle. Rude customers thickened my skin. Our menu forced me to become comfortable saying the word “breast” to strangers (which I don’t anticipate having to do much when I am the writing, speaking, counseling world changer I dream of becoming, but it’s better safe than sorry).

The point is that people who work day jobs but dream of dream jobs sometimes quit their day jobs before quitting a day job is smart. Others suffer through the day job under the assumption that it is a giant waste of time. And others – the kinds of dreamers Acuff encourages his readers to be – neither rush toward the dream nor squander the valuable experiences in the time spent “fundraising” for it at a day job. And also, Acuff is hilarious. I love him. Read his blogs. But first, read some of my favorite excerpts from the book:

On discipline:

“…discipline begets discipline. When you step up to a challenge before you, your ramped-up resources rub off on other areas of your life. You wouldn’t think eating less ‘fat’ would impact how closely you monitor your family’s financial budget, but it’s all tied together. Discipline and focus are contagious and they tend to spread their benefits all around.” -page 22

On deciding what to do with your life: 

“You don’t ask the bottomless, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ but instead, ‘What have I done in my life that I loved doing?’ Instead of a million different options from out there, you’re suddenly left with a manageable handful of options from within your own experience. Instead of trying to hitch your star to an endless black hole of options, you hitch a ride on your rewarding past.” -page 40

On tackling perfectionism:

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.” -page 62

On time management: 

“Few would boldly declare, ‘Today, watching television for two hours was one of the most important things I needed to get done.’ Yet that’s where we sometimes spend our entire evenings. The operative word in the phrase ‘enough time’ is not time. It’s enough. And the truth you should accept is that you will probably never have ‘enough’ time to pursue your dream. But every day somebody somewhere is making magic with the less-than-enough time he has. So can you, if you stop focusing on the amount of time you have and start focusing on the amount of tasks that really matter.” -pages 73-74

On stealing time from your day job to work on your dream:

“If you took your car to a mechanic and they charged you for seven hours of labor to fix it, you’d have a problem if three of those hours were spent spinning pottery. You’d be incredulous if when you complained about the bill they said, ‘We’re sorry. Pottery is our mechanic’s dream. He loved Ghost. We put a wheel and kiln behind our shop and he just really got into it the other day. He made some beautiful vases.” -page 111

“[I stopped] stealing time from work because they purchased forty hours of work, not just forty hours of my presence…” -page 111

On livin’ the dream: 

“When I finally published a book, I couldn’t wait to say, ‘I’m an author! I’m an author!’ When I had lunch with my oldest daughter at her school and she told her classmates, ‘My dad is an author,’ I was thrilled. That was a label I wanted to spoon at night and couple skate with at Roller Kingdom.”

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Click here to learn more about Quitter.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. So, if you click the links and purchase the products I recommend, I earn a little commission at no extra cost to you. And when you do, I am sincerely grateful.