A Million Miles

I finished re-reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years today. I read it for the first time shortly after hearing him speak at a church in Tyler, TX when the book had just come out. Many of these stories stick in my mind more than those in his other books – all of which I adore – as I remember the way he told them and the extra details he was able to add.

Don (I know that’s informal, but I honestly think he’d prefer that to Mr. Miller) focuses on stories in A Million Miles. He writes about how his life, his own personal story, doesn’t feel meaningful or complete. He gives examples of people who have grown lazy in their marriages, people who never reach out and take that next crucial step, who stop understanding that there’s something better.

At a crucial point in his story, Don tells of paddling across a seemingly endless inlet in the dead of night. “I think this is when most people give up on their stories,” he writes. “They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and the change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger.”

I feel like I’ve been drifting between shores for quite some time now. The concise way of summing up my feelings about it is this: waiting is hard. And the detailed version: Waiting is one of the most difficult things faced in life. Lately I’ve felt stuck in an endless loop of waiting: waiting for a job, then once a job was found, waiting for finances to get better. Finances haven’t gotten better, so now it’s waiting for Matt to get a job, waiting to find out if he can go to school, waiting to see if we can afford to fix the cars, waiting through endless calls about debt we can’t pay, waiting for the day we can finally be out on our own again, waiting to feel like an independent adult again, waiting for a feeling of accomplishment, waiting for the next step.

And believe me, this isn’t sitting around, twiddling thumbs waiting. This is constant searching, constant questioning, constantly striving for something to finally go right. This is waiting that attempts to drain all resolve.

Almost every day I struggle to not be crushed beneath the thought that this could all be my fault: that I moved us down here and into this failure because of something I couldn’t handle. Last fall when I finally scrapped my pride and applied for unemployment, my application was denied, saying I had left the position because “the work was too hard.” I had the chance to explain my case, but it did no good. And because of that, those words have never left me.

I worked for that company a total of three days last September, and they felt like the worst days of my life. I crammed the hours trying to learn the policies, procedures, and complicated figures that would help me succeed. But when I got home after 9 PM the third night, knowing my trainer would be leaving the next morning, I knew I needed more time. I wasn’t yet ready to handle that kind of enormous financial responsibility without someone there to double-check my work. I knew could learn it, but not that fast. I met with them the next morning, stated my reasons, and asked for more time. I was denied. I turned in my keys and left.

I drove to the empty mall parking lot across the street and cried until I could barely breathe. Matt and I had made the move on the promise of reimbursed costs, and now we had nothing. We had signed a new lease and paid the fees the day before, and now we had no way to keep it. Our bright new future turned into a backwards tumble down a hill.

After four months of searching, I found a new job. At my current job I make more than I did in Longview, but not by much. The job I left would have doubled my salary and then some. That job would have let us live in an apartment with 1,000+ square feet of space, save for a house, make loan payments on time and send Matt to school with manageable debt. But the other job didn’t happen.
“What if” can be two of the most dangerous words in the world. They have the ability to heal, but also to crush. “What if I hadn’t left? What if I had blundered my way through and eventually got it right? What if this is all my fault? What have I done to us?”

I tell myself to not play the guilt game, but it happens anyway. I know that I'm much happier at this job than I ever would have been there, but that doesn't stop the feeling that I, and I alone, did this to us. That I gave up without good reason. That I destroyed our only path to contentment.

I know God has something in the future for us, but it’s hard to keep up hope when your husband has received dozens of job rejections, your two cars need serious repairs and your credit card is creeping ever closer to the max.

There are times when I just want to give up everything in the hope that our next try will be better. I’m not giving up hope, and I’m not letting doubt overtake me, but I am saying that it’s hard. I anticipate the moment Donald Miller describes, when he and his fellow paddlers reach the other shore and are awed by the glory of the scene around them. "It’s like this with every crossing, and with nearly every story too,” he writes. “You paddle until you no longer believer you can go any farther. And then suddenly, well after you thought it would happen, the other shore starts to grow, and it grows fast. The trees get taller and you can make out the crags in the cliffs, and then the shore reaches out to you, to welcome you home, almost pulling your boat onto the sand.”

I’m impatient, and I’m worn out, but I’m waiting. I don't expect our future to be perfect, but I'm ready to draw closer to the shore and further from doubt.