Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes.

In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.”īlue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me.

“ I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer.

Donald miller blue like jazz author