The Disillusion of Control: My (Misguided) Interpretation of “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”

“I am not the author; I am the protagonist,” I said for the third time in a row. A single tear trickled down the side of my face as the burden I had been carrying for the past four years were, in a single instant, lifted from my shoulders. “I am not the author; I am the protagonist,” I said again, as if with each time it sinking deeper and deeper into my soul, resonating throughout my being.

In 2011, I read a book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by one of my favorite authors, Donald Miller. In this book, Donald Miller explains that we were all destined to live great stories, like the ones that we have watched growing up and have heard as we were being tucked into bed. He explains that the human soul is designed to live a good story, but more often than not, the soul settles to be a consumer of stories rather than involved in a story of its own.

As an eager 20 year old, this fascinated me. I immediately started writing down all the stories that I wanted to live. I was going to open up a coffee shop, live in the Rocky Mountains for a winter, do the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, start a non-profit, and love a woman and start a family. My fears of failure and rejection were quickly replaced with the fear of not living a story worth telling. The way I read it, God had given us the pen and said, “Write away, great captain.”

And so I did just that. I took the pen that I believed was handed to me and I wrote. I wrote as hard as I possibly could. I started reading a lot because in order to write well, you must know who you want to write like, who your influences were, who you were going to sound like. I decided if my life could read like anyone’s life, I wanted it to read like Hemingway’s (minus the adultery and divorce). His pursuit of what was true, his fearlessness, and his no bullsh*t attitude were attractive qualities that I wanted to have. Since I was in charge of writing my own story, I would want the character to be a combination of 1/3 Hemingway, 1/3 Erwin McManus (for similar reasons as Hemingway), and the remainder a combination of John Mayer, Kendrick Lamar, and Ryan Gosling. But the more I started to write the less happy I became. The character that I was building started to contradict himself. The womanizer in John would not be happy with the pastor in Erwin. The Compton-ness of Kendrick did not always agree with the Canadian-ness of Gosling; and the story that the character was living became just as convoluted as the character himself. The character ended up losing his identity and falling into a hopeless depression.

***

“You put too much pressure on yourself, you know?” she said as I laid my head on my pillow exhausted and burnt out. “You think you need to create all these things, but they are not your responsibility. You take on so much that you were never meant to control. You’re so focused on writing a good story that you aren’t able to be present and enjoy the story that is in front of you.” As soon as she spoke those words, I knew that they were true; not the type of truth that needs to battle with the lies in your head, but the truth that cuts through the darkness, pulling the mask off revealing the lie for all the evil and deception that it is.

Rather than believing that I create because He creates, I started believing that I create because He would not do anything unless I did. Creating was not a mirroring of what I saw Him doing, it became a job that He had hired (read: saved) me to do. In my paradigm, God gave me the pen to write my own story and if I did not write, I would be a middle-aged man looking back wondering where all the good years of his life had gone. The truth is, He does want us to write, but I believe our involvement is more like a game of Mad Libs than it is writing Of Mice and Men. He gives us the story with certain blanks in it, and lets us fill in the rest. It is not a divine play in which He gives us a script to read and rehearse; nor is it this deistic documentary where he watches us from afar. It is the divine-human relationship in all its beauty.

We are all a part of this overarching story of redemption. We have all been given a leading role to play. When we are too focused on being the creator, we end up forsaking our role as His creation. We are not the author; we are all the protagonists in this beautiful story that He is writing.