by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, some of us have known you for years. You have often talked about being grateful to be in a “new place.” Many times I have thought I had changed after receiving a “great insight” or having an inspiring experience at a conference or after reading a book, but people around me don’t seem to believe I’ve really changed. My question is: What is a specific example of your knowing you have changed in a significant way, and someone close to you believing that you have changed significantly? What would that look like?
Ooh, difficult question. But the most recent experience I’ve had that convinced me and a family member that I have changed happened this summer.
After about twenty-five years of flying under the radar of the Christian author/speaker world, I had received an invitation to conduct a weekend conference in a local church located several hundreds of miles from here. I thought, “If I can speak without drooling on my shirt front, or thinking I am Bruce Larson in midsentence, maybe I could do a little traveling and speaking again.” But, at eighty-two, I was a little nervous about it. (I’d participated in some institutional programs during the past few years, but usually shared the time with one or two, or a number of speakers.)
I prepared my material, and then packed my clothes etc. in a large suitcase. Andrea was going with me (and I was secretly very grateful about that since I was feeling some of the fear and anxiety of my younger days.)
At the last minute, Andrea said, “Honey, your bag weighs just a little too much. Would you like for me to take something out?”
Now Andrea is a truly amazing wife. She helps me in a hundred ways—but she is very wise and always asks first if I would like her to help. So I said gratefully, “Thanks. Just take out the heavy black shoes and the brown tie shoes and put in the cordovan loafers. I’ll wear them with everything.” So she finished packing, and the next morning I stumbled out of bed and we caught a flight to Alabama.
When we arrived, I just had time to shower and dress for the opening Friday night session. I planned to wear a dark suit or sports coat to the meeting. As I sat down to put on my shoes, I glanced at my watch. (Ah, not a minute to spare—but on time.) But then, I slipped my shoes out of their red shoe bags. The only pair of shoes I brought looked strange. Then it hit me. THERE ARE TWO BROWN LEFT SHOES—ONE LOAFER AND ONE TIE SHOE! AND NO TIME TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!!
All the adolescent fears of my youth descended on me, fears that I had secretly protected my self from for almost 70 years, (by prayer, reasoning with myself, taking a drink, running away). What could I do? It was too late to run to a store and pick up a pair of new shoes (at that moment I would have paid $500 for any two that matched.)
Then I looked at Andrea who knows me so well. She was in anguish, and sounding a little fearful, “I’m so sorry, Honey! Oh, how could I have done that?”
“Exactly the right question!” I thought. And I felt the old fear-anger rising in my chest.
Now some people who are not proud, insecure males may not see this situation as significant problem—to be coming back to your former vocation at eighty-two, (specifically trying to demonstrate that you are not an addled old man), and having to wear dirty white sneakers with a dark suit to speak from the front of a sizeable church. But for me it was my worst nightmare, and it was really happening! And then I thought, “And it isn’t even my fault!”
I felt my eyes narrowing, as I prepared to shame my wife (in order do get the onus off me somehow), by saying with icy sarcasm something like, “Is packing one pair of shoes that difficult?” (Interpreted for non-Texans: “Can’t you even pack ONE damn pair of shoes?”)
But then, unexpectedly, I thought about God, and how I was about to tell these people that God loved them. And then I saw in my imagination the faces of some of the men in the men’s group I meet with, and remembered how we are trying to surrender our entire lives to God. And then I looked at my dear wife, who had never in the thirty years of our marriage made a mistake (like the shoes) that involved me. And I thought about how she had interrupted her work to come along on this trip and help me, knowing how scary this could be for me at my age. I looked at her face. No excuses, just concern for me—and she was prepared for the axe.
She said uneasily, looking at her watch, “They’ll be here in five minutes. What are you going to do?”
Inside, something happened. I suddenly smiled as I realized that I was saying to God, “Sir, I realize that this shoe deal may provide the answer to the viability question in these peoples’ eyes—but I would appreciate it if you would let me make my own mistakes…like you always have before.”
And chuckling, I said to Andrea, “Listen, let’s make a game out of this. It’s a little bizarre, but I am going to be perfectly dressed, wearing one loafer and one tennis shoe. I’m going to wear that white sneaker this entire weekend, and I’m going to make you a bet. I’ll bet you that no one will have the guts to mention it. And I won’t even limp.”
I can still see the smile and the grateful, loving look on her face as she shook her head and laughed. The storm was over, and I was glad too. But then—almost immediately—my clever little self-centered mind was thinking that this two left shoes experience would be an unbelievably great story to introduce my weekend with the people—a story that would vindicate me. And my quick thinking would prove to the audience that I still have a sharp and agile mind!
But then, out of nowhere, the faces of my friends in the men’s group flashed into my mind, solemnly shaking their heads. And I realized that although telling the story would clear me of responsibility for my ridiculous costume, it would shame Andrea in front of all those people, making her look like a stupid wife (which she is anything but), when all she’d been trying to do was to help me correct something I hadn’t checked right in the first place. So, I just thanked God for stopping me from hurting the one I love, and got up and did my best to help those people see the wonder and love I’m finding in this life of trying to trust God for the outcome of everything I do. And I didn’t say a thing to anyone all weekend about the shoes. Only one person, an older lady, even asked about it. She said, “What in the world happened to your foot?”
In my most conspiratorial tone I whispered, “Oh, you wouldn’t want to know!” Her eyes widened, and she nodded, and walked away.
So, with regard to the question you asked about knowing whether I have really changed, virtually all my life that I can recall, I have hated to fail, be wrong, or be thought inadequate in any area in which I have been highly trained or successful. In order to avoid such opinions I have shaded the truth (i.e. lied—and denied to myself I was doing it, blamed someone else—even someone I loved—rather than take the blame for a shaming mistake.) But in this case, my love for my wife was greater than my fear of failure. In that moment in my eighty-second year, I saw that I had changed more deeply than I ever dreamed I might.
I didn’t even explain what had really happened privately to our host on the way back to the airport. The sense of peace and gratitude I felt as I sat down in the aisle seat of row fourteen told me more that in Christ even very old dogs can learn new tricks.
And how do I know that my wife recognized that I had really changed? All I can report about that came from two bits of evidence: first, the look of love and gratitude in her eyes when I told her about the game and the bet I was proposing, and two, that in our more than thirty years of marriage, I cannot remember a closer and more loving weekend together—following that moment.
Lord, thank You that You really can change us, if we will surrender as much of our futures to You as we can, and turn loose of trying to manipulate and control people, places and things to justify ourselves at every step and pretend to be more and better than we are. I know that in my case the battle is not nearly over (to rest content and trust You and just be the person You made me to be). But thank You that because of these unexpected little victories, I can sometimes trust You and really enjoy being my self—without trying to “fix the future.” Amen.
In the midst of his great chapter on love, Paul said some strange things about Christ’s kind of love, “Love cares more for others than self…Love doesn’t have a swelled head…Love isn’t always me first…Love doesn’t fly off the handle…Love doesn’t keep score of the sins of others…Love puts up with anything …Love trusts God always…Love always looks for the best…and Love keeps going to the end. (From 1st Cor. 13 THE MESSAGE.)
“Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”
Bill Wilson, Alcoholics Anonymous
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, you mentioned that your wife, Andrea, is also a writer. What kind of writing does she do, and is there something available in print now?
Yes, Andrea is a very accomplished writer and an editor. She recently showed me a devotional she wrote, and I asked her if we could use it on this Monday morning space. She agreed. So here it is.
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I looked at a picture of my brother and his family on the monitor’s screen. According to the e-mail to which it was attached, they were having breakfast with our sister on a visit to Tennessee where she was living in our late mother’s garden home. My sister’s happy face smiled back at me, too.
A flood of memories and feelings washed over me as I surveyed the scene…the familiar fireplace in the background over my sister’s shoulder flanked by the unfamiliar arrangement of objects placed there for a recent estate sale.
My eyes settled on my nephew’s face. At fifteen, he is tall and slender, much like my father had been at that age…and my brother, too. The expression on his face is so achingly familiar it causes a catch in my throat. Eyebrows raised high, lips pressed together and upturned in a smile, his smile echoes one of my father’s smiles. From grandfather to grandson…the connection is so visible. Of all the memories that picture holds, that one teen-age smile is the most gripping, a living connection to the precious gift we siblings have shared … parents with strong commitment and deep loyalty. They passed their great faith on to us as they guided and provided for the three of us and our sister (who suffered brain damage a few hours after her birth) through our growing up years.
We are in the process of dissolving that home place. My fingers froze on the keyboard as I wrote, thinking of all the “endings” taking place as we do this. We share the decision-making and work of this transition, and also the memories and gratitude for the gift of two such remarkable parents.
Lord, thank you that no matter what endings happen in our lives, we’ll never be alone. You’re always here to be our home. Amen.
“Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you.” – John 15:4 (THE MESSAGE)
“Sorrow … turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…”
– C. S. Lewis
Note from Keith: Andrea has written or co-authored seven books. The following are the ones still available at www.keithmiller.com.
• The Eternal Present, ed. by Andrea Wells Miller (Daily Devotionals Selected from the published works of well known Christian Authors)
• Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody, with Andrea Wells Miller and J. Keith Miller
• Breaking Free: A Workbook for Facing Codependence, by Pia Mellody and Andrea Wells Miller
• Facing Love Addiction by Pia Mellody, with Andrea Wells Miller and J. Keith Miller
Besides the books listed above, Andrea has written a number of study guides for books and small groups. She has also edited and helped write a number of Keith’s books.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, your life sounds like a real adventure story. How have you met so many interesting people and gotten them to help you? My experience vacillates between being boring and scary by comparison and people seem to resist helping me.
It’s interesting that you would say that my life sounds like “a real adventure story” because just this week Andrea and I were talking about the fact that we both think of our lives as being on an adventure as we try to learn to relate more deeply to God and to do God’s will as we can understand it. My life is sometimes scary, but it’s not boring. It could be that the reason I write about so many interesting people and experiences is that we have come to believe that everyone we meet on God’s adventure may teach us somehow about God and loving. So we pay a different level of attention to people and listen more intentionally than we used to—and people we contact everyday have become more fascinating to us. An “adventure” may begin in a very ordinary situation.
For example, about four years ago, I was helping our pastor begin a small group series at our church. At the introductory meeting each small group leader was asked to talk a little bit about their group and how the participants might grow spiritually. The group that Andrea and I were leading was titled, “Living What You Believe in Every Area of Your Life.” I briefly described that the group’s main purpose would be to learn how to walk in faith everywhere in their lives. After I spoke we broke up into several groups that had been selected by the staff ahead of time.
One young couple, David and Jessica Lyon, came up to me afterwards and asked if they could visit with us. They heard me mention a book and wanted to talk about it.
We invited them to come by after class and talk. As a result, we became friends and David and I began spending time discussing his interest in theology and the work we were doing in helping people discover and accomplish the dreams God may have planted in them. Shortly after that the woman who was our administrative assistant moved out of state, just as Jessica had decided that she was more interested in helping people the way we were trying to than following her vocational profession of being a teacher (she also has a degree in Architecture). She was looking for a way to accomplish that dream and follow God’s will for her. I told her that we needed some help, as our assistant was moving, but that she was way over-qualified for the job as our assistant. However, if she wanted to work for us for a while as she was making the transition, we’d be happy to have her with us. That was two and a half years ago and Jessica was a God-send.
Shortly after David and Jessica were married they decided to have a baby. As the time for the baby to come approached, Jessica said she was going to have to quit because they felt that it was especially important to care for the baby themselves the first several months of his life.
We agreed. But when Jessica told us she would still need to work, and after we all prayed about the situation, we invited Jessica to keep working and bring the baby with her. We have offices in our home, and her office was right next to our quiet, private guest room, which had a rocking chair in it. We borrowed a crib, and she could have a private place to feed and change the baby, and he or she could nap there. She accepted.
And so suddenly life changed for us. At 60 and 80 years old Andrea and I hadn’t been in the same house with a baby around for a long time. But since we believed this was the way we were supposed to live, we were excited when Blaine arrived at the hospital—and then appeared at our house.
We had some strange experiences during his early days. One morning, about 10:00 a.m., I was talking on the phone to someone in an Eastern city. Suddenly Blaine let out a big happy scream (that filled the entire house) followed by a sweet baby giggle and the business man on the line said, “What was that noise?”
I said, “Oh, nothing, it’s just the baby.”
“THE BABY! You’re 80 years old and you have a baby in your office?”
So I explained how Blaine had joined the team for his first season, as a free agent.
Andrea and I were writing a book at the time, the thesis of which centered around an argument Jesus’ disciples were having about who was to have the highest rank/position in God’s new Kingdom that Jesus was announcing.
Jesus was apparently horrified and disgusted that the argument was happening after all his teaching that the old order would be replaced with a whole different way of relating, doing away with the hierarchical social system they were arguing about. Jesus put a young child in the midst of them and said:
“I’m telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in.” (Matthew 18:2, The Message)
After Blaine started crawling, whenever I walked into Jessica’s office in the morning, he would look up at me but wouldn’t come to me. As I watched him glance up from the floor and then ignore me, it hit me that this new “distance” between the baby and me might have something to do with what Jesus had been talking about. The next morning I got on my hands and knees in the hall outside Jessica’s office, and crawled into the room where he was playing on the floor.
He glanced up, surprised, and didn’t look away. Then I lay down on the floor absolutely on his level and looked at him—eye to eye—across the floor. Blaine cocked his head a second and then crawled right over to greet me.
Suddenly I had two insights: (1) My lying on the floor to connect with Blaine was a picture of what God had done for us in Jesus—gotten on our level, becoming like us to get into our world so we’d feel safe enough to hear what God wanted to tell us. And (2) that the disciples were in some way to do the same thing, to deal eye to eye with the little child within the people they invited into the kingdom. Furthermore, as a twenty-first century disciple, I am to do this also, to walk with people in terms of their real inner lives as they are experiencing them and not from some elevated position as an expert theologian, professor, or therapist. I realized that disciples are still to relate to people vulnerably, with a kind of eye-to-eye-level love that was what the Kingdom Jesus was announcing was all about.
As I went back into my office and started to thank God for that insight, I realized an even more important thing that Jesus may have been saying to me, about my relating to God. Before I could relate much as a disciple of Jesus to the child minds of people I was talking to about the Kingdom/Reign of God, I would have to relate to God as a little child relates to his daddy. And when I thought about actually addressing God with the word, “Daddy,” I almost choked on it. It didn’t seem appropriate, not ‘holy’ enough. (But the word Jesus used in the “Lord’s Prayer,” the only prayer he gave us, was “abba,” translated properly as “daddy.”)
And it was then that I saw my problem: I didn’t want to be a helpless, defenseless child when I related to God. I wanted to be like an intelligent committed young therapist or disciple talking to his older, more experienced mentor. I was ashamed to acknowledge that. But I decided that this attitude just might be the thing that had me stuck on my book project and my life at age 80, trying to relate to God.
So I imagined myself as a little child coming to his loving, all-knowing, trustworthy, safe father, and one morning I finally addressed God with the word, “Daddy.” I began to cry, to weep as I hadn’t done in a long time, because I was warmed with the sense that I was at home and safe in God’s presence as a little child would be with an all-loving father.
I’m not saying that you should do what I did, but I am telling you that by taking a young couple named Lyon seriously one morning at a meeting in our church, a new adventure started that led me to discover a deeper relationship with God. And a little over three years later, I was rescued from a stuck place on our book project—you might say “trained”—by the youngest Lyon, named Blaine. And for me, that was a real adventure that took place in our own home.
Lord, thank you that we don’t have to do big things, be famous people or go to exciting foreign places to have “important” adventures with you. Thank you that you offer to introduce us to all kinds of fascinating people to love if we, as little children, pay attention and let you reign as our Daddy from heaven. In Jesus’ name, amen.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith, who was the person who gave you the courage to reveal your own problems and unacceptable feelings as a way to connect with and free Christians plagued by “unspeakable” problems?
Thanks for asking this. I haven’t talked about much, but at one point I knew that what I needed personally was a model: someone who was seriously trying to be God’s person and who obviously was committed to Christ and had intellectual integrity, but who also faced the kinds of fears, problems and failures that I faced. Evidently, this was not a combination to be found in a single Christian communicator. People seriously committed to God either did not have the kind of struggles I had, or considered them too insignificant to be mentioned. I had met some other strugglers who, like me, were trying to slug it out with this paradox, but we were all nobodies. I had never run across a communicator with any authority who admitted to this strange predicament of feeling unable to be whole, in spite of the power and joy to be found in the gospel.
Then in the summer of 1965, Dr. Tournier came to Laity Lodge in the remote hill country of southwest Texas for a conference. I was director of the conference center. And although I had heard of Paul Tournier, I had never read anything he had written.
The first evening he spoke, the “great hall” at the lodge was filled with psychiatrists, psychologists, MDs of all varieties, Christian ministers and lay leaders from various professions. The air was almost electric with expectation, and I realized how much the conference guests were looking forward to hearing this man whose books they had read. Many of the guests had traveled hundreds of miles for this weekend. We had turned down a number of requests to attend, and still the group had overflowed into the motel in the nearest town. As we all gathered for the first session, I wondered how well Tournier would be able to cross the language barrier from his French through an interpreter to us. I had no idea what content to expect.
Then he began to speak. Within five minutes the room had faded and we were transported into another world. A little boy was describing his struggle with loneliness and self-doubt almost sixty years before in a country several thousand miles away. You could have heard a pin drop on the stone floor. I sat behind the speaker near the huge fireplace and looked past Paul Tournier into the eyes of almost a hundred sophisticated American professionals. Inside those eyes, wide open, I could see a roomful of other lonely little boys and girls reliving their own struggles for identity and worth.
After fifteen or twenty minutes had passed, a strange thing began to happen, something I have never seen happen before or since. As Paul spoke in French, we found ourselves nodding in agreement and understanding—before his words were translated. We trusted him so much, and felt he understood us so well, that we knew at a subconscious level we would resonate with what he was saying. He described problems, doubts, joys, meanings, fears—many of which still existed for him—and spoke of them naturally, as if they were the materials God normally worked with in God’s healing ministry among all people, Christians included.
Before us was a man who did not even speak our language, an almost white haired man in his sixties who wore a wrinkled tweed suit and was exhausted from a whirlwind trip across America. And yet as he spoke fatigue, age, clothes and language difference all faded into the background. He turned periodically to make eye-contact with those of us behind him. I was mainly conscious of his sparkling eyes, his personal transparency, and a glow of genuine caring about his face. As he spoke, I felt and heard love and the truth of God about my own life.
I found myself having to fight back tears—tears of relief and gratitude, and release from my solitary burden. Because of my own struggles, I had sensed that, to be healed, we need more than good medical advice or even excellent psychological counseling. We need presence, vulnerable personal presence. I knew the Bible claimed that was what God gave us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit: his own presence to heal and strengthen us. And I had felt that somehow we Christians were to be channels to convey that healing presence personally to other people’s lives through our own openness and vulnerability. But in Paul Tournier I met at last a living model of the kind of communication I was trying in a stumbling, understand way to find.
I made two decisions during that conference. First, I would go back to school to get some psychological training. Second, as soon as I finished a manuscript I was working on, I would read some of Tournier’s books. I was already in the process of writing a book for new Christians about living in a personal relationship with God. Existing books of this sort seemed to me overly pious, and they did not deal with the “stumbling blocks” that had bothered me as a new Christian. After Tournier’s visit, I completed the manuscript of that, my first book, with great enthusiasm.
And when I sent my manuscript to the publisher, the next thing I did was to read The Meaning of Persons. Again, tears. For years I had been looking for books whose authors were real and transparent so that I could identify with their problems and move toward healing in Christ. The closest thing I had found was Augustine’s Confessions, written in the fourth century, which is what had finally persuaded me to write a book about my own struggles as a contemporary Christian. But if I had read Tournier first, I doubt I would have felt the need to write that manuscript, The Taste of New Wine.
Knowing that a man existed who loved God and yet who also faced his own humanity and used the discoveries and methods of scientific investigation did something for me. And knowing that, at least partially because of Christ, this man could afford to be honest about his own struggles, was to push me far beyond my small horizons of security and faith. From that day forward, until his death in 1986, Paul Tournier became a mentor and friend.
“Give from the center of who you are. Don’t fake it.” Eph. 4:15f THE MESSAGE
Lord, thank you that you want us “to grow up, to know the whole truth, and tell it in love.” (Rom. 12:9, THE MESSAGE) In Jesus’ name, Amen.
