In his book Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes the events surrounding his conversion and spiritual formation. The following story occurred after Miller—a recent graduate from high school—decided that God didn't exist:

I've always been the kind of guy who likes to be seen as smart. It's not as bad as it sounds because I don't go around saying all kinds of smart-guy stuff to make other people feel like jerks or anything; it's just that I was never very good at much of anything else. You know, like I would try basketball for a while, and when I was a kid I played soccer and tennis, but I was never very good at any of that. And then I learned to play the guitar, but got very bored because what I really wanted was to be a rock star, not to actually play the guitar. So about the time I told God he didn't exist, I was desperate for an identity.

While this was taking place in my life, I happened to attend a lecture by the chairman of the American Debate Team, who was about 25 or so, and there were a lot of girls in the audience because he was very rich and good-looking. The people at the school were going to videotape him talking about China or something, but the video camera was having trouble. The chairman of the American Debate Team had to stand on the stage for about 20 minutes with his hands in his pockets like an idiot, so what he did while he was standing there was recite poetry. I'm not making this up; this guy recited about a million poems, such as Kipling's The Vampire and parts of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha.

He was very good at it and said the poems with the right spacing so it sounded like he was speaking beautiful spells, and all the girls in the audience were falling out of their chairs on account of their hearts were exploding in love for him. So then the people at the school got the camera working and the chairman of the American Debate Team gave his lecture about China, but the whole time I was sitting there, I wasn't thinking about China; rather, I was wondering how I could get my hands on some poetry books and start memorizing them right away, on account of how much the girls liked it when the chairman of the American Debate Team recited poems. What I really began to ponder, I suppose, was whether or not coming off as a smart guy who knows poems could be my identity, could be the thing that made me stand out in life.

Now I didn't realize it at the time, but I would come back to this moment much later in life and realize something very important about myself—namely, that I felt something missing inside myself, some bit of something that made me feel special or important or valued. This thing missing inside me, I realized, is something God would go to great length to explain in his Bible. This missing something was entirely relational, and by memorizing poetry, by trying to find an identity, and even by renouncing my faith at the car wash, I was displaying some of the very ideas God would speak of in Scripture—some of the ideas about being separated from a relationship that gave me meaning, and now looking for a kind of endorsement from a jury of my peers.

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