Story :: Donald Miller

• A good story has a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
• What’s meaningful in a story is meaningful because it’s meaningful in life.
• Story teaches us what is beautiful, what’s worth dying for and what’s worth sacrificing for.
• Story has an incredible power to engage the human mind.
• There’s a difference between music and noise.
• We engage narrative differently than the language of experience.
• Narrative teaches us what we should be living for.
• Lists of values outside of narrative are meaningless.
• Stories in the Bible don’t stop and tell you what the moral of the story is.
• The story is ongoing.
• We sit down with the text and ask, “what’s in this for me?
• What if God was just in it?
• What if it’s just a relationship with Him that we’re meant to engage in?
• Story adjusts our moral compass.
• We learn by living a story.
• It’s possible to live a good story.
• All of the elements of stories are conditional.
• Characters are important, but they don’t have to be perfect.
• Characters have to sacrifice of themselves for the benefit of others to make a good story.
• Oftentimes our stories are selfish and self-serving.
• Success doesn’t tell a very compelling story.
• A character is not who they feel they are, think they are, or who they want to be.
• A character is only what they actually do.
• What we do tells a story about who we are to the people around us.
• The story we’re telling ourselves is often different than story we’re telling other people.
• We have to want something.
• If the protagonist doesn’t want something, the story can’t start.
• What story are you telling with your life?
• A story cannot be meaningful unless it involves conflict.
• We are taught that there’s not supposed to be conflict [ by the media and in church ].
• What does it mean to be “who God designed you to be?”
• We are born into conflict.
• We cannot reverse the role of conflict in our lives.
• Conflict is here to stay.
• Dark conflict entered into our lives as a result of the Fall.
• God created a protagonist in us.
• We desire what we cannot have.
• Conflict is beautiful.
• Conflict is the only way a character changes.
• The only way we can change is through pain.
• It’s true in a story and in real life.
• Conflict adds value to what we are trying to obtain.
• The Christian worldview has been hijacked by commercialism.
• It’s robbing of us of great stories.
• We need to look at conflict differently and share our stories, embrace conflict.
• If Christians could have a courageous attitude toward conflict, we could change the world.
• In story, there’s a desire for a climax, an act 3.
• In one action, conflict is over.
• The desire for climax is fascinating.
• We are a protagnoist… conflict has to take place to give life meaning.
• There’s always been a desire for conflict to go away.
• It manifests itself like wishful thinking in our lives.
• We’re taught conflict goes away through the climactic act of Jesus.
• The an inference is that Jesus is the climax and an end to our suffering.
• Jesus was not the climax.
• The truth is, in our theology, our conversion is not the climax.
• Conflict just gets worse.
• Can you imagine an infomercial with the Apostle Paul trying to sell Jesus?
• There’s a difference between the Biblical epic and the story we are taught.
• We’ve filtered our theology through commercial messages and lost the true power of our story.
• We are in Act 2 right now.
• Act 3 takes place at the wedding feast of the Lamb.
• When we die and are reunited with Christ.
• Paul didn’t sell Jesus as a product to take pain away, he talked about HOPE.
• What we have is incredible hope.
• The number one way America consumes stories is not through film, television or books, the number one way we consume stories is through each other.
• Tell beautiful stories with your lives.

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