Nathan Miller

I want to make an appeal this morning for your prayers. After work today, Jenny and I are heading to Virginia to spend the night at my parent’s house. Then tomorrow we will drive to Greensboro, NC to talk to a church planting strategist about church planting opportunities in North Carolina. If you have been following me for some time, then North Carolina might come as a surprise. Jenny and I have been praying about planting a church in the west for  a few years now, but God keeps closing the door. I’ll explain the whole story on another day.

Please pray for us that we will have wisdom from heaven as to where to plant a church. It is my fervent desire to serve the Lord with my life, and I want so desperately to go where He would desire me to. I’ll post an update about our meeting later, but please remember to keep us in your prayers. Our meeting is at 11:45 tomorrow. Thank you!

For all of you who follow me on twitter, you probably saw this morning’s tweet. I asked what the best book(s) you’ve read over the last six months. Many of you responded to my tweet, and there are some great books on the list. Some I have read, and others I have not. Here they are!

• Lost and Found – Ed Stetzer
• Essential Church - Thom and Sam Rainer
• Leading with a Limp -Dan Allender
• High Stakes – Kathy Herman
• Liberating the Ministry from the Success Syndrome – R. Kent Hughes
• Crazy Love – Francis Chan
• High Call High Privilege - Gail MacDonald
• Building Your Leadership Resume – Johnny Hunt
• Voices Behind the Veil – Ergun Caner

If you have any other books you’d like to add to this list you can do so by leaving a comment.

As we continue this series of posts on reading, I want to return to the quote I left you with you last.

“It’s been said that five years from now, we will be the same people we are today except for the books we read, the people we meet, the places we go, and the risks we take.”

As I think about this statement, the reality of it is glaring back at me. Think about it in your own life! Where were you five years ago? How did you view the world? Have you changed any of your views in five years? The difference in my own life is staggering, and I have to give a lot of credit to the many authors who have influenced my life. I have literally read hundreds of books in the last five years. Remember this is coming from a guy who didn’t like to read in High School. If I can learn to love reading, so can you!

This brings me to my next point. It’s not just about reading, but about reading intelligently. Reading at its core is an exercise designed to make you think. This sounds obvious, but rather than processing the truth and validity of what they are reading, many people store it away only to regurgitate a pre-packaged viewpoint. I am guilty of this in the past, but when we read, we must make an intelligent assessment of the literature before us. I want to recommend a great book from which I will quote to make my point. The book is entitled How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It’s a classic book on reading comprehension and critical reading.

“The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to ‘make up his own mind’ with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effective that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and ‘plays back’ the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having to think. – How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading – page 4

This quote alone is worth the price of the book, but if you desire to learn to read intelligently as well as increase your reading comprehension get this book!

I write this post because more and more I see this very thing happening. Adler and Doren tried to warn us about it, but it continues. It extends beyond the scope of reading to TV and Radio as well. It’s easy to take the pre-packaged thoughts that are presented to us and repeat them. After all, we even sound intelligent when we do so. I am challenging think! Think about what you read, think about what you hear, and think about what you see. There are thousands of opposing opinions in the world, and they cannot all be right. Check the facts! Think and pray over what you read, and I promise that it will be an exercise you will not regret.

And with that, I will close for today. I promise the next post(s) will be practical in nature. I’ll talk about what to read, how to read, and maybe list some advantages of reading. Some of the information will be from Between the Times so check it out if you haven’t already.

I believe the title says it all. There is a lost art, and it’s called reading. In our ever growing tech savvy society we are growing less and less dependent on reading. Now, as you know, I am a tech nerd myself, and I’m always interested in the newest, coolest gadget. However, in our day of instant communication, where we have at our fingertips more information than generations before could find in a lifetime, we have laid aside the art of reading. I have heard it said that we are a sound bite generation. Watch the evening news and tell me if I’m wrong.

“Wait a minute,” you might say. “I do read!” Really! What? Are you reading magazines, journals, novels, fiction, non-fiction, theology, or a number of other categories? All those genres are good, but are you limiting your reading to just one?

I must confess that the idea for this post came from reading another blog entitled Between the Times. It’s a blog written by several of my former seminary professors at Southeastern. Dr. Bruce Ashford wrote a series of six blogs on Disciplined Reading. If you have the time, I encourage you to read them. I found them extremely helpful. Reading has been a personal struggle for me over the years. In my younger days, reading was not a priority for me. I missed out on so many great opportunities in my middle and high school days. However, in college, when I entered the Word of Bible Institute, I was forced to read, and read I did. At first it was difficult, but then I found that I enjoyed it. As I continued through my under-grad and graduate education that enjoyment turned into a love!

I want to spend the next few posts talking about what I learned from Between the Times, as well as some of personal thoughts or experiences. I will leave you with a quote that has stuck with me for quite some time. I have heard it quoted many times, and I’m not sure who the original author is but here’s the quote:

“It’s been said that five years from now, we will be the same people we are today except for the books we read, the people we meet, the places we go, and the risks we take.”

Okay, so I know I’ve been bad about updating again. I guess time flies and I forget how long I go without writing. That or I’ve resigned myself to dumping my thoughts on twitter. You can always stay more up to date there.

I do, however, want to do a quick family update. Most of you should know that our second child, Hannah Ruth was born on June 22nd. Both Mom and Baby are doing great. We are transitioning to a four person home quite well. It’s interesting to see Josh interact with her. Sometimes he can be a wonderful and sweet big brother, and other times he attempts to rip Hannah out of my arms. He is still a daddy’s boy and doesn’t like anyone, even his sister invading his turf. I have to say that being a father is one of the greatest things I’ve ever experienced in my life. I am truly grateful to God for the family that he has given me.

There’s more that can be said, but I need to run. I do want to tell you about a set of posts that I’m going to do in the future. One is on reading, how to read, what to read, etc… It’s based off of a series of blogs run by my Seminary, Southeastern. More to come later. I also want to talk about a great book I just finished last week called Crazy Love. Stay turned for the updates, and here are some pictures. (More in the gallery!)