Catherine Larson, who published the splendid As We Forgive earlier this year, works at BreakPoint (Chuck Colson), and is a Contributor for us here at Common Grounds Online. For Breakpoint this week she interviewed Donald Miller regarding his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life.

Donald Miller is fairly well known for his Blue Like Jazz book that has sold a million copies and is being made into a movie.

This is what interviews could be and should be. Read Larson's interview with Miller (here).

Excerpts:

CL: One of the parts of your book I liked best was when you talk about character development. Can you explain what character transformation has to do with living a good story?

DM: Well most stories—maybe I should say many stories—are about the arc of the character. You know Dickens’ A Christmas Carol would be the best example. You see Scrooge at the beginning and he’s a bitter old man, and by the end he’s a generous person who’s been changed by conflict, by encountering what’s at the heart of who he is. And that’s by design. That’s something that God has designed. It’s the way that He changes us. We are people who are constantly changing, and that’s by design. We’re becoming something different all the time and hopefully we’re becoming something better.

Even before the Fall of man, you see the elements of story. You see Adam being lonely, not being complete....Adam walks with God, knows God intimately, has not sinned and yet is lacking. God knows what he’s lacking because he created Adam to lack and he needed a woman, so instead of giving Adam a woman, God tells Adam to name the animals, which probably took many, many years.....

Well, that’s God’s design and it’s His design before the Fall of man and not after the Fall of man. So story exists before the Fall. Now conflict really got hijacked after the Fall. It’s very different than it was because there are all sorts of other painful realities that we deal with because of the Fall of man, but God intended to change our character from the beginning. And so that’s one of the reasons in Scripture it talks about, “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials, knowing the testing of your faith is producing perseverance.” That conflict is by design, it’s something that God wants and we’re supposed to engage it with a positive attitude because it changes our character. It changes who we are.

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Again, read the whole interview between Catherine Larson and Donald Miller.