Not long ago I listened back through Blue Like Jazz, a book that mattered a great deal to me in my twenties. I kept waiting for it to land the way it used to. It didn’t. And for a minute I felt something close to guilt, like I’d shown up at an old friend’s house and found we had nothing to talk about.
The book that was there when I needed it
I read Donald Miller in the mid-2000s. I wasn’t questioning my faith. I wanted to understand it better, and I was reading widely to do that, including some authors who wandered past where Scripture goes. Inside that line, Miller gave me something I needed: a Christian being honest that the way he’d been taught to share Jesus didn’t click for him.
The scene that stuck was Reed College. Miller in a monk’s robe, sitting in a confession booth — except he and his friends weren’t hearing confessions. They were making them, apologizing to whoever walked in for the ways Christians had failed them. That floored me. Vulnerability as a way to reach people was not something I had seen modeled.
Listening now, the booth still holds up. A lot of the rest makes me wince. What I hear underneath the honesty is a writer who is hard on himself to the point of preoccupation. His hang-ups about relationships, his uncertainty about where God was in his ordinary life — all of it circles back to himself. In my twenties I called that vulnerability, because I was circling the same way. Now it reads as young.
Here’s the part I find most encouraging: Miller didn’t stay there either. A few years later he sat through Robert McKee’s Story seminar, started asking what kind of story his own life was telling, and wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years about it. The inward-looking memoirist became a craftsman who teaches businesses to make the customer the hero. He went from being the subject of every sentence to building a career on getting out of the way.
The man outgrew the book the same way I did. It worked because it met me where I was. Neither of us is there anymore.
The book I wasn’t ready for
C.S. Lewis was the opposite. I read The Great Divorce early and got the surface: a bus ride from hell to the edge of heaven. Clever idea. I moved on.
What I missed was that every conversation in that book is a diagnosis. Each ghost shows you the exact mechanism keeping a person from God, and almost none of them are dramatic. They’re mundane. A grievance someone won’t release. A small, stubborn way of depending on yourself.
Take the wife who wants her husband back so she can go on managing him. At twenty-something she was a caricature to me. I’m grateful that isn’t my marriage, but I’ve since watched that relationship play out in real life, and it is unnerving how precisely Lewis drew it.
The book didn’t get deeper. I finally had enough life behind me to see what was already on the page.
The book that grew with me
Then there’s a third kind. John Eldredge’s Way of the Wild Heart lays out the stages a man moves through — Beloved Son, Cowboy, Warrior, Lover, King, Sage. When I first read it I was mostly locating myself on the map.
Now I read it and see my son. I see the men around me. I see stages I’ve passed through and ones I’m entering. The framework hasn’t changed by a word, and it keeps getting richer, because I keep bringing more to it.
A book is a fixed point. You are not. So rereading is one of the few honest ways to measure how far you’ve moved.
When a book that once shaped you goes flat, it didn’t fail and you weren’t foolish to love it. It did its job. When a book that bounced off you suddenly opens up, you weren’t dull back then — you just hadn’t lived it yet. And when a book keeps giving, hold on to it.
That’s why I reread on purpose. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is one I keep going back to, because the question of what story my life is telling keeps getting a different answer.
David Willis 