Every once in a while I read a book that perfectly expresses my own intuitive ideas about the world, only in a way that is more clear, articulate, and compelling than I could ever put it. Blue Like Jazz is one of those books.

For every chapter I read I find myself inwardly cheering, "Yes! That's right! Finally someone gets it!" On matters of Christian love, tolerance, politics, evangelism, and involvement in the secular world Donald Miller expresses things I've been feeling for a long time. Some of them I've discussed openly, while others have been more difficult for me to put into words. It's passages like this that I love:

I felt like both churches came to the table with a them and us mentality, them being the liberal non-Christians in the world, and us being Christians. I felt, once again, that there was this underlying hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and, well, hippie types. I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. I liked them. I cared about them, and they cared about me. I learned that in the woods. I had never felt so alive as I did in the company of my liberal friends. It isn't that the Christians I had been with had bad community; they didn't, I just liked the community of the hippies because it was more forgiving, more, I don't know, healthy.

The big difference between me and Donald Miller, though (aside from the obvious fact that he's a much better writer than me) is that he doesn't just criticize the church--the greatest portion of his criticism he reserves for himself. Following the passage I quoted above, he goes on to say that the problem with Christians, himself included, is that we treat love as a commodity, doling it out to the worthy and withholding it from those we would like to change. From there Miller talks mostly about examples from his own life--how he can show love more unconditionally to everyone, including Christian fundamentalists.

Although Miller expresses a lot of views that I already agree with, what I am taking from this book is that the way to change Christianity is to start with myself.