In Searching for God Knows What, best-selling author Donald Miller invites you to reconnect with a faith worth believing. With humor, intelligence, and his trademark writing style, he shows that relationship is God’s way of leading us to redemption. And our need for redemption drives us to relationship with God. “Being a Christian,” Miller writes, “is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.”
Maybe you are a Christian wondering what faith you signed up for. Or maybe you don’t believe anything and are daring someone—anyone—to show you a genuine example of authentic faith. Somewhere beyond the self-help formulas, fancy marketing, and easy promises there is a life-changing experience with God waiting. Searching for God Knows What weaves together beautiful stories and fresh perspectives on the Bible to show one man’s journey to find it.
“Like a shaken snow globe, Donald Miller’s newest collection of essays creates a swirl of ideas about the Christian life that eventually crystallize into a lovely landscape . . . [He] is one of the evangelical book market’s most creative writers.” —Christianity Today
“If you have felt that Jesus is someone you respect and admire—but Christianity is something that repels you—Searching for God Knows What will give you hope that you still can follow Jesus and be part of a church without the trappings of organized religion.” —Dan Kimball Author of The Emerging Church and Pastor of Vintage Faith Church, Santa Cruz, CA
“For fans of Blue Like Jazz, I doubt you will be disappointed. Donald Miller writes with the wit and vulnerability that you expect. He perfectly illustrates important themes in a genuine and humorous manner . . . For those who would be reading Miller for the first time, this would be a great start.” —Relevant
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"In Searching for God Knows What, Miller unpacks why the Christian faith cannot be whittled down to a three-step self-help program or some simplistic mathematical formula comprised of a few mere propositional beliefs. I was amazed, honestly, at how deftly this book laid out so much of the thinking God has been instilling in my own life this year...in Miller's understanding (and I agree), everything goes back to a time before the fall, when man was still living in peaceful, right relationships with God, with his fellow man, and with his environment. Once Adam & Eve were deceived into disobedience to the God who created and deeply loved them, they lost the security they had known as a result of their perfect relationship with God. Ever since, it has been obvious that man was designed to need to derive his sense of value from an outside source, but since our relationship with that source was broken, we've looked to acquire that sense of value from other men. This has created what Miller describes as a lifeboat mentality in which we are all vying to prove our importance and why we should be kept in this proverbial lifeboat (indicating in the process that other individuals who don't possess the same valuable qualities we do ought to be selected to be thrown overboard). Clearly, this sort of thinking has some very negative implications that play out with us manifesting ever deeper levels of brokenness in human relationships that first broke at the fall when our relationship with God was broken. The good news of Christianity is that in Jesus -- as a result of His redeeming death & resurrection -- our relationship with God can be restored, which means we can recover the security God designed us to live in.
Too often we miss all of this, and Christianity becomes a mere argument we add to our slate of reasons why we should be kept in the lifeboat. However, when we begin to see the bigger picture and recognize the story God has been telling from the beginning of time, we begin to grasp that this was never meant to secure our position in the eyes of man but rather was meant to restore our security in God, which then allows us to throw away the lifeboat mentality and frees us up to live in humility, loving God and loving others and thereby fulfilling the law that was intended to restore the peaceful, right relationships man experienced before the fall with God, with his fellow man, and with his environment.
Highly recommend this book, particularly to those who, like me, have grown up in church during a modernistic age that has so focused on propositional truths that we've nearly completely missed the narrative of God's work in the world from the beginning of its creation. I imagine Miller's thoughts here have opened many hearts to the depth of beauty in God's story. Quite possibly my favorite of his books, and there could not have been a more perfect time in my life for me to read it than toward then end of a year in which He has truly transformed my thinking in these very areas.
On a side note, I purchased this book at Powell's Books during my first visit to Portland -- a trip that was largely inspired by my reading of other books by the Portland-based Miller (as well as books by fellow Portland-area author Matt Mikalatos) that have helped inform the process of transformation that has been taking place in my thinking this year. It was fun, then, to read his mentions of various Portland locations throughout this book after having been there myself. It really felt like a sort of culmination of this past year for me, not only as it relates to my understanding of my faith but also as it relates to the books I've read that have been instrumental in what God has been doing in my heart and the common thread of being set in Portland that has connected so many of them. I think this book will always have a special place in my heart because of all this. =)"
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Kaysi (5 out of 5 stars)