through painted deserts

ive talked about donald miller before..im a huge fan of his two previous books - blue like jazz and searching for god knows what. he recently released another book, through painted deserts. it appealed to me not only bc of the author but because of the excerpt on the back:

"...a road-trip memoir about 3 months spent crossing the country in a VW camping van, wondering out-loud if there is more to life than nine-to-five jobs, than the ruts the entire world seems to be stuck in.."

if you know anything about my life then you know that that hit pretty close to home..not being in a van, but the 9-5 job rut. this book is a little different from the others - more of a road journal that documents a road trip don and his friend paul take from houston to oregon. below is another excerpt from a chapter i just read that i really liked. and if you're from houston it's not meant to be an attack on you...just substitute dallas or some other booming metropolis in there if it makes you feel better.

"i tend to think life is about security, that when you have a full year's rent, you can rest. i worry about things too much, i worry about whether or not my ideas are right, i worry about whether or not people like me, i worry about whether or not i am going to get married, and then i worry about whether or not my girl will leave me if i do get married. lately i found myself worrying about whether or not my car was fashionable, whether i sounded like an idiot when i spoke in public, whether or not my hair was going to fall out, and all of it, perhaps, because i bought into houston, one thousand square miles of concrete and strip malls and megachurches and cineplexes, none of it real. i mean it is there, it is made of matter, but it is all hype. none of the messages are true or have anything to do with the fact we are spinning around on a planet in a galaxy set somewhere in a cosmos that doesn't have any edges to it. there doesn't seem to be any science saying any of this stuff matters at all. but it feels like it matters, whatever it is; it feels like we are supposed to be panicking about things. i remember driving down I-45 a few months ago and suddenly realizing the number of signs that were screaming at me, signs wanting me to buy waterbeds, signs wanting me to watch girls take off their clothes, signs wanting me to eat mexican food, to eat bbq, backlit, scrolling signs wanting me to come to church, to join this gym, to see this movie, to finance a car, even if i have no money. and it hit me that, amid the screaming noise, amid the messages that said buy this product and i will be made complete, i could hardly know the life that life was meant to be. houston makes you feel that life is about the panic and the resolution of the panic, and nothing more. nobody stops to question whether they actually need the house and the car and the better job. and because of this there doesn't seem to be any peace; there isn't any serenity. we can't see the stars in houston anymore, we can't go to the beach without stepping on a coke bottle, we can't hike in the woods, because there arent any more woods. we can only panic about the clothes we wear, panic about the car we drive, sit stuck in traffic and panic about whether or not the guy who cut us off respects us. we want to kill him, for crying out loud, and all the while we feel a need for new furniture and a new television and a bigger house in the right neighborhood. we drive around in a trance, salivating for starbucks while that great heaven sits above us, and that beautiful sunrise is happening in the desert, and all those mountains out west are collecting snow on the limbs of their pines, and all those leaves are changing colors out east. God, it is so beautiful, it is so quiet, it is so perfect. it makes you feel, perhaps for a second, that paul gets it and we don't - that if you live in a van and get up for sunrise and cook your own food on a fire and stop caring about whether your car breaks down or whether you have fashionable clothes or whether or not people do or do not like you, that you have broken thru, that you have shut your ear to the bombardment of lies that never, ever stop whispering in your ear. and maybe this is why he seems so different to me, because he has become a human who no longer believes the commercials are true, which, perhaps, is what a human was designed to be."

pgs. 75-76, through painted deserts