Starbucks and strangers

Last night Brie and I went and studied at Starbucks. There was this guy there who kept coming up to talk to us (not in a creepy stalker way) but I think he really just wanted a friend...and someone to talk to. He told us about living and growing up in Alaska, how he loves music, new gadgets he had just bought, we talked about genetics (what Brie was studying) and God (what I was studying). It was really interesting. Seattle is so full of interesting people.

Some of the passages that struck me last night...I am truly obsessed with this book!
"I don't feel like God is teaching through me. I feel like I am a fake person, you know. I say what I need to say, do what I need to do, but I don't really mean it...I have become an infomercial for God, and I don't even use the product."

"I never asked to be human. Nobody came to the womb and explained the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain...I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn't breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like an experience of freedom."

"I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and our Redeemer. This is why Paul had no questions. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisioned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen."

"...what a great responsibility it is to be human."

"He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. 'Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?' he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend."
-- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

This incredible book is reiterating what I have been feeling as of late. It's convicting and inspiring.

Saturday mornings are the best, pancakes, no alarms, no agenda. Just curling up with a good book while the sun hides (yet again) and it rains (yet again).