In this interview with Scott Noble of Noble Creative, Miller talks about his years in the ministry, his mother and what he would do differently.


MCC: What made you decide to write your memoir?

Miller: As I say in the book, we don’t have a big window of time to do this. I’m 72, so what happens is you need to write them while you still have enough of your mind to remember your life. And at the same time while you have the skill to say it.

Now hopefully I’ll go on living for a good bit and maybe there can be an epilogue to the book in 10 or 15 years, but you can’t depend on that, you know? It’s a time thing mostly. I wanted to do it for a long time, but it just seemed like the right time.


MCC: You’ve been a pastor, professor, author and poet. Where do you think God has used you the most?

Miller: Probably my writing has been the number one thing. It gets out to all the world. It always amazes me; I spoke to a little literary group up in Huntsville, Ala., yesterday. I didn’t know any of them, but they all came to the meeting with books they had bought across the years.

I can’t help but believe but would be true in virtually any community I would go to, that there would be some people who own some of my books. As many people as I pastored—and I had a pretty good sized church— writing was the way that I was supposed to bless the Lord or have him bless me.


MCC: Looking back on your life, when did you most feel God’s abiding presence and when did you feel it least?

Miller: It’s kind of like I say in the book: it’s the edgy times, it’s the times when you are on the brink, you don’t think you are going to make it, it looks like you’re going to perish. Those are the times when you reach out eagerly to cling on to something when you’re on the edge.

I think the things that draw you to the edge of yourself and your sanity sooner or later become those moments that you prize as the moment of change, the moment of insight, the moment of pleasure, ultimately.


MCC: You talk a lot about your mother in the book. What kind of influence did she have on your life?

Miller: Well, I think a most almighty influence, probably. I think mothers do that anyway. Anybody’s mother who is a good mother becomes sort of a number one point in their lives. I think that’s true even for pastors who have fathers, which I didn’t.

When you don’t have a father, I think what happens is you really begin depending on your mother. You listen to her, you remember her sayings. And then when she died, I felt this incredible sense of loss. The counsel is gone. That one thing that one feels for one’s wife or one’s mother that they’re always in your corner, that was gone.

She became the lens through which I saw the world. She was there from the beginning, so she caused me to focus and to see as was proper.


MCC: Looking back on your life, is there anything you’d do differently?

Miller: One of them is I would pay more attention to my chief mentors. I would reward them. In many ways I didn’t before. Starting with my mother. And with other people who spent so much of their time and counsel and love for me. I would go back and be nicer to them. I would treat them like they should have been treated. I wouldn’t pass them by so quickly.

I think I would do more inter-culturally. When I was a pastor for 35 years, I rarely ever left the parish.

I would take people, and I would go to places and do missions far off. Not because I think I can help those people but because something wonderful happens when you are with people who love God and they are a different color and they’ve got different problems—and somehow the kingdom of God really grows.

What I love about Jesus is his globalization. This amazed me about a man who never left his hometown very far. He recreates all these disciples who shortly after his death are off to the [far] flung world beyond him. That amazes me that fishermen wound up in Rome, because he globalized who they were; he made them bigger.

That’s what I would do.