Blue Like Jazz

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller, is by far one of the greatest books I have ever read in my life. I thank God for getting David to get me to read this book, because A LOT of things were spoken to me through this book. God spoke through Don Miller in the most fascinating way I have ever heard anything described before. So much of what Don wrote in his book has helped me with many different aspects of my life. I can honestly say the way I viewed things with God, the way I lived my life for God, the way that I loved people, the way I treated my self, and the way my perspectives were on so many different things the night before starting to read this book are completely different now, and I give God all of the glory, for this change. I am going to probably explain in detail what God has done with the different aspects of my life while I was reading Blue Like Jazz as the days continue on. I might not go in chapter order, or I might. I will see how God leads me to do so.

I really feel led to share what God has done with my life in just less than a week, and I am doing this in a way not many people do. I want people to know the real me, and not the me from the past that I allowed my self to invent. I want to start off by apologizing for exposing the invented me to everyone and not the person who God made me to be. I apologize for any worldly advice that I have given to any of you in the past, as probably anything I said is not valid if I think about it now. In the past I was never really able to show God's true love to anyone, because I was never in a good state of mind. It's ironic, that at times when I was drunk or high I was able to talk about God so easily. When I was under the influence, which most of the time I was, I would say things like, "God is the only one who can rescue you" "God loves you so much" "God is who you should be following" "God is going to keep us safe since you are driving us back to campus drunk" "I used to be close to God once" "I really miss how my life was when I was close to God" "Does living for God even matter" "I don't think there is a God." My mind was never clear; But when I was sober I was afraid to even speak the name of God. Maybe it was because I was afraid that God would really intervene with my life or afraid that God was going to help me change the entire life style I was living and show me who He really IS and what He can really do with my life! Now, I just want to learn to love God so much that I weep at the sound of His name--I want to learn to ALWAYS receive God's love!

There is this really sweet Korean lady named Mihye (pronounced me-uh) who works in the gift shop at the hotel I work at. She has come to be a pretty cool friend of mine. I call her "Mihye Gift Shop" because every time I call the gift shop from the front desk she answers the phone saying "Mihye Gift Shop!" I think it's hilarious! I can really tell how much she loves life right through her eyes. She just moved here from Michigan about four months ago so that she can open up a gift shop in the hotel I work at. She finally found a Christian Korean church that she likes and she goes every single Sunday. She really understands the fundamentals of God and of religion, and I am trying my hardest to get her to understand that it is so much more, that God is so much more than religion--God isn't religion, He is our creator, the one we should live for. I want her to understand not to live for religion, but to live for God. I think she is slowly getting it, day by day, by the conversations we seem to always have. I remember one night she asked me how I deal with my anger. She said that sometimes when she walks by the front desk some guest is profusely yelling about something, and she said she always wonders how I control myself from getting angry and frustrated about that. She asked me this a couple of days after I watched one of Rob Bell's Nooma videos titled "breathe." I told her that I've learned to try controlling my anger by breathing, and when I breathe I know that I am breathing the air that God has provided to me; I know that I am breathing God. I continued on and I told her that I also control any anger trying to build up inside of me by talking to God. She was puzzled by this statement, and looked at me with her cute confused look that she likes to give me and asked me, "You mean really talking to God? Like you talk to God just how we are talking?" I responded honestly and said, "yes just how we are talking right now is how I talk to God, and I know He is listening when I talk to Him and it's beautiful to me." That put the biggest smile on her face and she just kind of walked away from the front desk and went back into the gift shop. Now sometimes she will randomely come to the front desk and ask me if I've talked to God today, and I just smile at her and say yes, yes I have. I've had a couple of great conversations with Mihye during this past week. The one I am about to speak about is a conversation we had last night. She saw that I was reading Blue Like Jazz, and it's so hard for me to explain things to her sometimes, because she doesn't completely understand English and at the point she asked me what the book was about I wished that Blue Like Jazz was written in Korean, because I so badly wanted her to fully understand what I was getting from this book. I told her that it is a book that has non religous thoughts on Christian spirituality. She looked at me, smiled, and said, "wow you're really getting into God aren't you?" I just smiled, because I guess that was a good way for her to understand kind of what I was reading, and I felt at peace that she somewhat understood the concept of the book. We ended up starting to talk about her dog. She told me she treats her dog as if he is her own child; she doesn't have any kids. She says anything you can buy for a dog, he has it. She said that all women have this natural instinct inside of them to be a mother and she doesn't have any kids so she treats her dog with royalty. She walks with her dog for almost two hours every day and again every night after she gets home from work. She said even though sometimes her dog pees on the carpet when she is not at home she doesn't get mad; she understands that sometimes that is going to happen, that he will be distracted and end up peeing on the carpet, because he feels that he can't hold it until he gets outside. All of her dog's trust is in Mihye. She has talked to me about her dog before, and every single time she mentions her dog this HUGE, BRIGHT smile is shown from her face. But last night when she was talking about her dog for a good ten minutes I realized something. In her dog's eyes, she is his "god." She is her dog's master. Her dog obeys her and loves her because of all the blessings that she gives her dog. I was standing there thinking wow Mihye really loves this dog unconditionally, and it struck my mind that this is how God loves us! God loves us so much that He blesses us as long as we acknowledge Him and live our lives for Him, because He is our master! Because God loves us so much he protects us at times, times that we don't even realize are His doing. Just as Mihye's dog peed on the carpet several times, a sign of disobeying her or not having the ability to control himself, this is how God loves us. No matter how far into the pits of distraction we fall into, God is still going to love us--and that love is so unconditional.