"I remember the sweet sensation of leaving years ago for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place... and I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace (else). I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing... everybody has to change or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently. Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds to minutes and our minutes to hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was...
Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers. It's a living book, this life; it folds out into a million settings cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are, it is coming to a close quickly. So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving & some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God.
We get one story, you and I, and one story alone... it would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go.
It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back.
It is you who will have changed."
(Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts)
