I am always amazed when I watch the Olympics. These athletes are immensely talented and incredibly dedicated. They prepare their whole lives for one short moment of competition that plays itself out in front of millions and millions of people.

What stands out to me about Olympians isn't as much their athletic ability (which is unbelievable), but their motivation. They are disciplined. They are driven.

And that intense motivation is key. What is it that drives people to spend hours and days and months and years of their lives trying to win a medal? Why all the training and all the sweat and all the grueling days? Is it really just to win a little piece of metal and stand on a podium? 

A few years ago I read Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What. And although I didn't agree with everying Miller says in the book, I think it's very insightful regarding what motivates us as human beings.

In chapter 8, "Lifeboat Theory," Miller points out that we feel that we have to prove ourselves to others. We have to give the people around us some proof that we belong. This need for acceptance is the reason that people strive to be cool, or popular, or intelligent, or athletic, or good-looking, or wealthy, or whatever. It's why people buy the clothes they wear, it's why they listen to the type of music they listen to, it's why they identify with certain sports teams and certain brands. It's why we're on Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. We're desperately striving to impress people.

We feel that we have to prove to other people that we belong, and this need for acceptance drives almost everything we do.

Miller starts the chapter this way:

When I was a kid in elementary school my teacher, Mrs. Wunch, asked our class a question that I've come back to about a million times, trying to figure out an answer. The question she asked went along with a lesson about Values Clarification, which is a fancy name for learning how to be a snob. This is how the question went: 

"If there were a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat were a male lawyer, a female doctor, a crippled child, a stay-at-home mom, and a garbageman, and one person had to be thrown overboard to save the others, which person would we choose?" 

I don't remember which person we threw out of the boat. I think it came down to the lawyer, but I can't remember exactly. I do remember, however, that the class did not hesitate in deciding who had value and who didn't. The idea that all people are equal never came up. As I was saying before, we know this sort of thing intrinsically. Or at least we thought we did. 

Miller goes on to point out that because of the Fall, we all feel like this. Society is like a lifeboat without enough room for everyone, and everyone is competing to show why they have worth, why they should be accepted, why they are good enough to stay on the lifeboat.

In other words, because of the Fall, we have all lost the thing that gave us a sense of perfect and total acceptance and love, and now we feel like we have to earn it from the other people around us. So we have to compete with each other.

This sense of competition is all around us. Society is set up to make people feel like they have to prove to everyone else that they belong on the lifeboat. For example, Miller points out that almost every reality show on television is about seeing who gets to stay on the lifeboat and who doesn't.

Think about it. Almost every reality show is a contest about who gets to stay and who gets kicked off. Top Chef. American Idol. The Voice. Last Comic Standing. The Bachelor. The Bachelorette. Survivor. It's all about who's better than who.

In fact, Miller mentions a show called Rank! in which people on the show get judged on some random criteria such as who has the best eyes, who has the best hair, who has the best body, etc. This would sound cruel, but it's so normal. This sort of one-upsmanship starts as early as preschool, when kids argue over who has the better toys, who has the better backpack, who's dad has the better job, etc.

This is how it feels to be human: I have to prove myself to the people around me. I have to show them that there's something good about me--my sense of humor, my sense of fashion, my athletic ability, my intelligence, etc.--some reason that they should accept me. Because if they don't think highly enough of me, I'm devastated.

I have to believe that this is at least part of what drives some Olympians. This is the reason that they have trained and trained and trained for years and years and years. This is why they have traveled across the world. This is the reason that they have prepared their whole lives for a competition that may last only five minutes. This is the reason they face the unbelievable pressure.

Because if they win, if they get to stand on a podium for two and a half minutes while the anthem plays, if they win that little piece of metal, they will prove to everyone else that they belong.

As a Christian, I'm thankful that I don't have to feel that pressure. I know that I am totally, completely, and utterly accepted by the only One who matters. I can have a sense of love and acceptance and worth that makes the opinion of others utterly irrelevant. I can receive the love of Christ, who loved the people who were kicked off the lifeboat--the poor, the lame, the lepers, the Samaritans, the losers. I can know the love of the Christ who looked into the eyes of someone such as John the Apostle, giving him such a sense of worth and acceptance that for the rest of his life, he identified himself as "the disciple who Jesus loved."

Lifeboat living is infinitely tiring and never satisfying. But Christ loves me and accepts me because of His work on the cross. He alone satisfies. For that I'm thankful.

Nobody really remembers easy stories [where characters do not face much conflict. But in good stories,] characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That's what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death. . . . These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world. 

I was watching the news the other night, and they were still covering that story in Mumbai about the terrorists who went on a shooting rampage. . . . I kept imagining [the victims], just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.

Don Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, pp. 31-32

From Searching for God Knows What:

"When I was a kid and, to be absolutely honest, a teenager and perhaps even a young twenty-something, I believed God was like Santa Claus. I realize grown people should not think God is like Santa Claus, but you wouldn't believe how perfectly convenient it was for me to subscribe to the idea. The benefits were astounding. First: To interact with Santa Claus, I did not have to maintain any sort of intimate relationship. Santa simply slipped into the house, left presents, ate half a cookie, then hit the neighbors'. . . .

Second: Santa theology was very black and white; you either made the list or you didn't and if you didn't, it was because you were bad, not because of societal pressures or biochemical distortions or your parents or cable television, but because you were bad. Simple indeed. Third: He brought presents based on behavior. If you were good, you got a lot of bank. There was a very clear reward system based on the most basic desires of the human heart. Big Wheels, Hot Wheels, Legos. You didn't have to get into the spirit of anything, and there waas nothing sentimental that served as the real reason for the season. Everybody knew it was about the toys: cold, hard toys. Fourth: Kids who were bad got presents anyway.

Perfect.

Slowly, however, everything began to unravel. . . . Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to keep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies."

From Ch. 1 of Searching for God Knows What:

"It seems when God had the Bible put together, He hid a lot of the ancient wisdom so, basically, you have to read into things and even kind of make up things to get a formula out of it. And the formulas that are obvious are terrible.

For instance, a guy named Stephen was miserable (or at least I assumed he was miserable) and then he became a Christian, and then he was stoned to death. This formula, of course, was not good enough to make the cut. And for that matter, neither was the one about Paul, who was a murderer before he became a Christian and then was blinded while traveling, met Jesus in a burst of light, and then spent various painful years moving from city to city, prison to prison, routinely being beaten and bitten by snakes. No formula there. I moved on to Peter, who was rescued from a successful fishing business only to be crucified, some historical accounts claim, along with his wife. And of course that wouldn't work. So I decided to ignore the actual characters of Scripture and just go with the teachings of Jesus. And that is when things really became difficult. Apparently Jesus had not heard of the wonderful tool of acronym. He mostly told stories, some of which were outlandish. . . . 

Of course, I got frustrated. And it really got me thinking that, perhaps, formula books, by that I mean books that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible. . . . It made me wonder, honestly, if such a complex existence as the one you and I are living can really be broken down into a few steps. It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was.

. . . 

The qualities that improve a person's life are relational, relational to God and to the folks around us. . . . When Jesus was walking around on earth He taught His disciples truths through experience, first telling them stories, then walking with them, then causing stuff to happen like a storm on the sea, then reiterating the idea He had taught them the day before. Even then it took years before the disciples understood, and even then the Holy Spirit had to come and wrap things up. So it made me realize that either God didn't know about the formulas, or the formulas weren't able to change a person's heart.

To be honest, though, I don't know how much I like the idea of my spirituality being relational. I suppose I believe this is true, but the formulas seem much better than God because the formulas offer control; and God, well, He is like a person, and people, as we all know, are complicated. The trouble with people is they do not always do what you tell them to do. . . . 

Some would say formulas are how we interact with God, that going through motions and jumping through hoops are how a person acts out his spirituality. This method of interaction, however, seems odd to me, because if I want to hang out with my friend . . ., I don't stop my foot three times, turn around, and say his name over and over like a mantra, lighting candles and getting myself in a certain mood. I just call him. . . . 

. . . Life is complex, and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in a few steps is rather silly. 

The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love."

“If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. ” Donald Miller, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years

I took a class on Moses from a man named John Sailhamer. It was the best class I have ever taken. I didn't normally take Bible classes back then, but my friend John MacMurray told me John Sailhamer is one of the smartest guys in the world when it comes to talking about Moses. I told him I still didn't want to go to the class, that I wanted to watch television, but at the time I was living with John MacMurray and his family, and he told me that I had to go if I wanted to continue living in his home. So I went to this class and about five minutes into it I knew I was taking the best class I would ever take. If you ever have the opportunity to take a class from John Sailhamer, you should. His knowledge concerning the Old Testament is quite ferocious.

 At one point in the class, for instance, a lot of us were getting confused because we couldn't figure out what translation of the Bible he was teaching from, so we asked him. It turned out he was teaching from the ancient Hebrew, translating it in his mind into English as he went along. And you might think a guy like that would go around speaking Hebrew all the time to impress people but he didn't, except one time when he read a long piece of poetry that Moses wrote. He read it in Hebrew and it sounded so beautiful that when he was finished, even though none of us knew what he had said, we sat around very quietly because we knew we had heard something profound, something Moses had sat and labored over for a very long time, something that ancient Hebrews would have read and then stopped to slowly note the complexity of its beauty, and the depth of its meaning.

 The thing about John Sailhamer is, he helped me love Moses. I don't know if I had given Moses much thought before that class, but after hearing John Sailhamer talk about him, he became a human being to me. Dr. Sailhamer said Moses, unlike most writers in Scripture, would stop the narrative to break into the kind of poetry he had quoted earlier, a kind of poetry called parallelism, which is when you say something and then repeat it using different phrasing. He said the way Moses wrote wasn't unlike the way people who write musicals stop the story every once in a while to break into song. At first I thought Dr. Sailhamer was just making things up, but he showed us in the text several places where the writer clearly stopped writing narrative and began writing poetry. The reason Moses would do this, according to John Sailhamer, is because there are emotions and situations and tensions that a human being feels in his life but can't explain. And poetry is a literary tool that has the power to give a person the feeling he isn't alone in those emotions, that, though there are no words to describe them, somebody understands.

I can't tell you how beautiful I thought this was; I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth. By that I mean if you have to describe loneliness or how beautiful your sweetheart is or the way a rainstorm smells in summer, you most likely have to use poetry because these things are not technical, they are more romantic, and yet they exist and we interact and exchange these commodities with one another in a kind of dance.

 This comforted me because I had grown up thinking of my faith in a rather systematic fashion, as I said, listed on grids and charts, which is frustrating because I never, ever thought you could diagram truth, map it out on a grid, or break it down into a formula. I felt that truth was something living, complex, very large and dynamic and animated. Simple words, lists, or formulas could never describe truth or explain the complex nature of our reality.

What John Sailhamer was saying was meaningful because it meant God wasn't communicating to us through cold lists and dead formulas; it meant He wanted to say something to our hearts, like a real person....

God used a great deal of poetry in the Bible. David was a poet and his son Solomon created a musical called Song of Songs . . . , and even Paul had memorized the works of Greek poets so he could speak them from memory when giving a talk. If you quote a poem in a sermon today, some people think you are being mushy, but if you quoted one back in the day, people would have felt you were getting to the core of an idea, to the real, whole truth of it. And after taking John Sailhamer's class, I started wondering if the message God was communicating to mankind, this gospel of Jesus, was a message communicated to the heart as much as to the head; that is, the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the ideas could not be presented accurately outside the emotion within which the truths were embedded.

And if you think about these things, it only makes sense that if God was communicating a relational message to humanity he would use the multilayered methodology of truth and art, because nobody engages another human being through lists and formulas. . . .

I began to wonder if the ancient Hebrews would have understood this intrinsically, if they would have sat around . . . reading poems knowing this is where real truth lies, and if our age, affected by the Renaissance and later by the Industrial Revolution, by Darwin and the worship of science, hasn't lost a certain understanding of truth that was more whole. If you have a girlfriend and you list some specifics about her on a piece of paper--her eye color, her hair color, how tall  she is--and then give her this list over a candlelight dinner, I doubt it will make her swoon. But if you quote these ideas to her in a poem:

She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes. . . . 

. . . she is more likely to understand the meaning, the value inferred by your taking notice of her features. The same ideas, expressed in poetry, contain a completely different meaning. She would understand you were captivated by a certain mystery in her aspect, in her eyes and her stride and the features perfectly met upon her face. And while our earlier conceived list of features might have been accurate, it certainly wouldn't have been meaningful.

 Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

I like the Bible. Now that I no longer see it as a self-help book, it has infinitely more merit. It has soul, I guess you could say. As far as the writers in the Bible go, there are a few I like more than others. I like Paul the best because he said the hard stuff about women in ministry and homosexuality and you get to thinking he was pretty severe, and all of a sudden he starts getting vulnerable as though he is feeling lonely, needing to share personal stuff with somebody. When I come to these parts of his letters I feel he was writing late at night and was perhaps very tired, in some stranger's home who was intimidated because they knew his reputation but had only just met him. If you had a guy in your home who was always getting beat up about the faith, thrown in prison and that sort of thing, it would make you feel intimidated and nervous about having him in your home; it would make you wonder exactly how committed you are. I'll bet Paul didn't care, though; he doesn't seem like the type to judge people, but you know people were intimidated by him anyway.

He was terribly intelligent. For the first couple of days in a new town, Paul probably felt completely alone. I see him like this when he talks about how he wants to go home and be in heaven but stays on earth so he can write letters and preach. I see him writing by candlelight at a stranger's table when he talks about how he has this thorn in his flesh and can't get over it and prayed about it three times, but God said to him, "My grace is sufficient for you." It's writing like this that I like in a book. If a writer is going to sit down with a big important voice and try to get me motivated about something, I pretty much don't want to read anymore because it makes me feel tired, as though life were just about getting a lot of things done. Paul never did this. He was terribly personal.

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

I had always assumed a kind of anonymity with God. . . . But if the gospel of Jesus is relational; that is, if our brokenness will be fixed, not by our understanding of theology, but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only heaven knows. Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with ... a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation.... Earthly love, I mean the stuff I was trying to get by sounding smart, is temporal and slight so that it has to be given again and again in order for us to feel any sense of security; but God's love, God's voice and presence, would instill our souls with such affirmation we would need nothing more and would cause us to love other people so much we would be willing to die for them. Perhaps this is what the apostles stumbled upon.

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

I was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart, or, more honestly, it made other people tell me I was smart. This was how I earned my sense of importance. ... By doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that I was a human wired so other people told me who I was. This was very different from anything I had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and I still believe that is true, but I realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. And the thing that had been designed to tell me who I was, was gone. And so the second idea became obvious: I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone.

And it wasn’t just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley MacLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did.

 Later, when I set this truth about myself, and for that matter about the human race, next to what the Bible was saying about who God is, what happened at the Fall, and the sort of message Jesus communicated to humanity, I realized Christian spirituality fit my soul like a key. It was quite beautiful, to be honest with you. 

This God, and this spirituality, was very different from the self-help version of Christianity. The God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear.

...  [We] go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable. What if the economy we are really dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?

 Now this changes things quite a bit, because if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on a nice list, then it doesn't meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn't interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather, obvious) language we are all speaking. But if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it [God/Eden], and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it is more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.

 Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

The temptation for each of us to measure ourselves [is] insatiable. . . .

A child learns early there is a fashionable and an unfashionable in the world, an ugly and a pretty, a valued and an unvalued. Where this system comes from, God only knows, but it is rarely questioned, and though completely illogical and agreed upon by everyone as evil, it remains in play, commanding our emotions as a possesion. It isn't something taught to us by our parents; it is something that comes naturally, as though a radioactive kind of tragedy happened, screwing up our souls. Adulterated or policed, the system can grow to something more civilized, but no less dominant as a drive of nature. In youth the system is obvious. If you want to hear the operating system to which humans are subjected, step into a classroom of preteen students and listen to the dialogue. You will hear the constant measurements, the talk about family wealth, whose father drives what car, who lives in what neighborhood, or who is dating whom.

Here is how it feels: From the first day of school the conversation is the same as it would be if hundreds of students were told to stand in line ranging from best to worst, coolest to most uncool, each presenting their case for value, each presenting an offense to the cases of others, alliances being formed as caricatures of reality television (or vice versa).

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

From Donald Miller's Searching for God Knows What:

[If an alien came down to earth to study human nature, I wonder what he] would think of our television shows. He probably wouldn't understand any of it, because all the plots have to do with getting and finding the thing that is missing in our souls, only not getting it from God, but from other people.

If the alien wasn't missing the same thing we were missing [in our souls], he would sit there in my room with Grant and me, watching basketball but not understanding why we play the game. Why do they do that? the alien might say. It's a game, a competition, Grant and I would answer. But why? Why do they play the game? What are they trying to decide?

They are trying to decide who is the better basketball team, Grant and I would say. The better basketball team? the alien might question, wondering out loud why twenty thousand people would show up to find out which basketball team was better than the other.

Feeling a little judged, Grant and I might change the channel to find that new show on E! called Rank, the show that ranks people from best to worst, based on some random criteria. The episode might count down to who is the most eligible bachelor, who is the hottest couple, who has the best eyes, best smile, whatever. Then, knowing the show was again proving the alien's point, just like basketball, we might turn the channel to that show Survivor, and then over to The Bachelor, and then over to Last Comic Standing, or Fear Factor, or whatever. And then we would sort of feel bad because all of our television shows are trying to figure out who is better than who, or if they aren't, they are presupposing that one kind of person is better than another and building their comedy or their drama on this presupposition.

You guys, the alien might say, you are obsessed. You have to wear a certain kind of clothes, drive a certain car, speak a certain way, live in a certain neighborhood, whatever, all of it so you can be higher on an invisible hierarchy. It's an obsession! You are trying to feel right by comparing yourself to others. It is ridiculous.

Miller goes on to imagine the alien writing a description of human beings. Here's how the alien would describe us:

"Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem.”

“Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem.”

That is how an alien would see the world, in my opinion. It is obvious to me there is something wrong with us; there is something incomplete. . . .

Don Miller, Searching For God Knows What

As far as the writers in the Bible go, . . . I like Paul the best because he said the hard stuff . . and you get to thinking he was pretty severe, and all of a sudden he starts getting vulnerable as though he is feeling lonely, needing to share his personal stuff with somebody. . . .

If a writer is going to sit down with a big important voice and try to get me motivated about something, I pretty much don't want to read anymore because it makes me feel tired, as though life were just about getting a lot of things done. Paul never did this. He was terribly personal.

Don Miller, Searching for God Knows What

That is the thing about life. You go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable. What if the economy we are really dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?

Now this changes things quite a bit, because if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on a nice list, then it doesn't meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn't interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather, obvious) language we are all speaking. But if it is more, if it is a story about humanity falling away from the community that named it, and an attempt to bring humanity back to that community, and if it is more than a series of ideas, but rather speaks directly into this basic human need we are all feeling, then the gospel of Jesus is the most relevant message in the history of mankind.

Don Miller, Searching for God Knows What

"I realized that there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. And the thing that had been designed to tell me who I was, was gone. And . . . I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone.

"And it wasn't just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley MacLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did."

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

"Some would say formulas are how we interact with God, that going through motions and jumping through hoops are how a person acts out his spirituality. This method of interaction, however, seems odd to me, because if I want to hang out with my friend Tuck, I don't stomp my foot three times, turn around, and say his name over and over like a mantra, lighting candles and getting myself in a certain mood. I just call him."

Don Miller, Searching for God Knows What

"Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and . . . a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human's social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem."

Don Miller, Searching for God Knows What