The other relational through-line in Scary Close (beyond the guides) is Donald Miller’s bride. When we meet her in the book’s beginning, she has just become his fiancee. It’s a reads like a classic “Miller” moment:
I’d spent more than a year pursuing her, even relocating to Washington, DC to date her, but once the ring was on her finger I went back into the woods.
Miller’s bride is both a through-line and a bookend here, and it’s the stuff he starts off with that caught me by surprise. I love how this significant person in the author’s life is something almost from another world, someone who makes him rethink many things. One of the first telling confrontations in the book occurs when Miller makes a comment about a friend of significance to his fiancee, how he’d “rather not spend any more time with that one, if she didn’t mind. It turns out she did.”
Miller elaborates:
And it wasn’t even my comment that did it. It was the idea that I could see a person as disposable. To Betsy, relationships were a life’s work, the sum of countless conversations and shared experiences. She’d no sooner end a relationship than she’d cut down an old-growth tree. In the heat of that argument I realized I was only a sapling in the forest of this woman’s life . . . If I was going to win her heart, I’d have to plant myself in the forest and slowly grow the rings that earn loyalty, just as she and her friends had done with each other.
I knew then, this relationship would have to be different. I knew I’d have to know myself and be known. These weren’t only terrifying prospects, they were foreign. I didn’t know how to do either. And the stakes were high. I was going to have to either learn to be healthy or I’d spend the rest of my life pretending. It was either intimacy or public isolation.
This was a reflection packed with truthful punch (and the first sign that I was going to love the book). It is no small thing to be willing to plant yourself: in a relationship, in a community, in a culture. But the call to something more real than disposability is something amazing. While the rest of Scary Close goes this way and that in its discussion of acting versus intimacy, this through-line remains the most potent. You really get the sense over the course of the book that Miller has grown up well (and that he is calling and challenging his reader to do the same). “The old me was slowly dying into the new me,” he writes near the end of the book. It’s the kind of good thing I think God wants for everyone.
I don’t want to quote much more at this point. I actually really encourage you to check out the book. I think you’ll find it a worthy read. Next week I’ll come back to it for three or four more key moments/concepts that have stuck with me since my first read. As always, Miller has some great one-liners that your could “unpack” in for days and days. You can also find Miller talking about the book and some of its cornerstone concepts at storylineblog.com. If you check it out, let me know what you think.
Be sure to come back tomorrow for a song and Sunday for a comic. Thanks for reading!
Space Enough, and Time 