So, I've said (probably about five too many times) that Blue Like Jazz completely changed my perspective. I don't know that that is necessarily accurate. I would have to say that really it solidified my thinking. I found that I identified with so many facets of Donald Miller's spiritual walk.
In the remainder of the first chapter, there was a section that particularly stood out to me. It begins on page 8:
The ideas I learned in Sunday school, teh ideas about sin and how we shouldn't sin, kept bugging me. I felt as thought I needed to redeem myself, teh way a kid feels when he finally decides to clean his room. My carnal thinking had made a mess of my head, and I felt as though I were standing in the doorway of my mind, wondering where to begin, how to organize my thoughts so they weren't so out of control.
That's when I realized that religion might be able to those things down, get me back to normal so I could have fun without feeling guilty or something. I just didn't want to have to thibnk about this guilt crap anymore.
For me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and God. I could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual Being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing. To me, God was more of an idea. It was something like a slot machine, a set of spinning images that doled out rewards based on behavior and, perhaps chance...
...What I was doing was more in line with superstition that spirituality. But it worked. If something nice happened to me, I thought it was God, and if something nice didn't, I went back to the slot machine, knelt down in pprayer, and pulled the lever a few more times. I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. But the fun never lasts."
I know I have found it very convenient to make God this impersonal, especially early in my journey.
What do you think about Donald Miller's image a of a slot-machine God? What resonated with you in the remainder of the chapter?
