Authenticity & Gen X

Writer Donald Miller was a church youth worker at a small college in Portland, Oregon, who gained an audience with his postmodern spiritual memoir, Blue Like Jazz (Nelson, 2003). Miller, 33, has a new book, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road (Nelson, 2005). Actually, it's a rewrite of a book from 2000, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance.

A typical Gen X who grew up with a absentee father, his writtings are filled with honest musings about his soul journey - about God the Father - the Wonder of creation, the procreation habits of Peguin etc.... which has helped him to find real and authentic spirituality.

I like some lines in his answers to Dick Staub Interview: Why God Is Like Jazz

"My generation simply does not respond to that. As soon as you stop talking about your faults, we turn you off. We think, "This is not true. This isn't a true person." It's not a criticism against any other generation. It's just a matter of we just don't respond to it."

Gravitas

Read the following lines from an article by M.Craig Barnes in Leadershipjournal

What makes leaders weighty, worthy, and believable?

"Gravitas is a condition of the soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to attract other souls. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with scars that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh.
It all expands the soul until it is larger than the body that contains it, large enough to hold the truth of the Word of God. And, like gravity, it pulls others not to the pastor but to the holy work that has occurred within the pastor's soul.
This gravity isn't a commodity that can be purchased with seminary tuition payments. It certainly isn't found in a library. A weighty soul has to be developed the hard way.
The early church found gravitas through persecution. The desert fathers and monks found it by abandoning comfort and entering a vocation of prayer. Most of the reformers found it in prison. The slaves found it by singing spirituals under the baking sun in the cotton fields. And pastors find gravitas in the congregation.

Hmm..