Through Painted Deserts : Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road was a fast and easy read. I’ll quote what I said on the Don Miller fan forum:

I agree that it would make an interesting movie: the mechanic coming along out of the blue, the providential linkages in the junkyard, the sidebar into Vegas. It’d have to be an art film, though, because I think this kind of a movie would have to be told with a lot of silence, with a lot of still shots and glances and shrugs broken up by brief snippets of dialogue.

Frankly, that’s the way the trip would seem; road trips with guys always start out with flurries of conversation, and then fade into the miles. I was reminded of my old hockey trips, back the year after I finished school, when we would travel to Minnesota or Denver or Connecticut or New York to broadcast a game. It was a familiar rhythm: work the week, gather on Thursday night, throw your stuff in the car, talk until we got to Nashville, and then just drive. When you drive a long time in a row—and Huntsville to Minneapolis is 18 grueling hours, most of it through the Midwest, with Madison and Nashville your only touchstones to urban America—your thoughts turn to God … or at least ours did.

I think that I resonate with TPD mainly because long drives are my thing. Sometimes it takes a trip to give you perspective on what really matters in life, for your thoughts to go away from your boss, your co-workers, your alarm clock, the humdrum crap that annoys you and occupies a bunch of useless brain cycles. Stripped away from all that and put on the road—where, to be honest, we really just have to stay between the lines and under the speed limit—our brains can rest from all the frustrations that so easily flood our consciousness.

Earlier this afternoon, I dropped in to see Jonathan and Ashley, and Jon mentioned that they’re going out to Oregon sometime to visit his sister and her husband. One possibility is that they might drive, which says to me that I should just loan them this book until they’ve made their trip.