It is so like me to be unoriginal. I think I'm being original and then I find out that everybody liked Slumdog Millionaire even before it won a million Oscars and everybody knows that kettle corn is the best and everybody really hates Disneyworld. So please forgive me for being hopelessly unoriginal today and talking about a book that nearly everybody lauds as a great post-modern piece of Christian literature. I know, okay, I know. Nobody's accusing Donald Miller of being the next Diederich Bonhoffer or C.S. Lewis though, so shut your yapper. The rest disdain it with upturned noses, so that's not really original of you either.

A few weeks ago I started to reread Blue Like Jazz and remembered how much I'd liked it the first time around. On a short roadtrip last week we took turns reading chapters out loud to each other and no one really wanted to stop, but we all really had to use the bathroom and breaks like that sort of mess up the mood. So we stopped. But I continued reading, short paragraphs, whole chapters, a sentence here and there. Today I came across my favorite section. I remembered it being my favorite section three years ago and realized today how unoriginal it was of me to pick this section as my favorite. Here's why: it's where the title came from, so it must have been the author's favorite section too. Blast.

In any case, I still like it. Which is not the point of all this at all. Here is the point, a snippet of my favorite section:

That's the thing about giving yourself to God. Some people get really emotional about it, and some people don't feel much of anything except the peace they have after making an important decision. I felt a lot of that peace.

Contrary to popular belief, even though I easily cry over very small meaningful things and very big inconsequential things, at the most pivotal junctures of my spiritual life there are not usually tears involved. There are resolute jaws and hard and fast rules and a whole lot of grace. But not usually emotion. But then sneaks in the peace. Crawling over my shoulder, nesting in my heart, finding a nook all its own. Peace.

And then I know I've made the right decision.

So there are decisions in front of me: rights or lefts, rights or wrongs. And even though there's a part of me that just wants some emotional reason to creep in, a feeling that just feels right, a certainty first and a decision afterward, the truth is that I've got to say yes and then the peace will come.

I was just hoping things would be different this time around. Which is so unoriginal of me.