Ann Voskamp
From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.Collection: Garden
Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.Collection: Regret
Of asking nothing of the reader - but offering a still, quiet oasis in the cybersphere to go vertical with God. An island of stillness to know that He is God.Collection: Islands
Because nothing is greater and we have no greater need, God gives God.Collection: Giving
Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all thingsCollection: Different
He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).Collection: Real
Isn't falling in love always the fullest life?Collection: Falling In Love
But wells don't come without first begging to see the wells; wells don't come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There's no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping.Collection: Earth
The blog is meant to be a bit of a side chapel - a place to slip into and still and encounter the glory of God - and come away again with a fresh sense that your life, right where you are, is a holy experience - that God dwells with you and in you, and where you are is holy ground, worthy of reverence and celebration and wonder.Collection: Holy Ground
So my blog wasn't about "platform" but really, it was everything you are not "supposed" to do in blogging.Collection: Blogging
It's the greatest compliment when the writer becomes invisible in the whole process.Collection: Compliment
A lack of doxology leads to depravity.Collection: Doxology
The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging. And I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into it when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.Collection: Book
The greatest compliment of the book [One Thousand Gifts]? Maybe the Muslim man in Iraq who was given the book and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus, wanted to live his life in thanks to God?Collection: Jesus
Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.Collection: Book
I make soup and I back bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can't experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn't that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes? The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything. If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?Collection: Self
God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.Collection: Giving
I started blogging in 2004, light years ago on the Web.Collection: Light
Once you have tasted conviction, you can’t bear to keep swallowing complacency.Collection: Swallowing
Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.Collection: Joy
The frame of a soul was never made for fame. The frame of a soul was made to serve.Collection: Soul
I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?Collection: Blood
Manna today or I starve.Collection: Today
Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.Collection: Lying
The answer to deep anxiety is the deep adoration of God.Collection: Anxiety
Real Womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father.Collection: Mother
There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.Collection: Life
The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.Collection: Fighting
The only way to care for the disadvantaged - is to disadvantage yourself -which is guaranteed to turn out for your advantage.Collection: Care
Homemaking is about making a home, not about making perfection.Collection: Home
At the last, this is what will determine a fulfilling, meaningful life, a life that, behind all the facades, every one of us longs to live: gratitude for the blessings that expresses itself by becoming the blessing.Collection: Meaningful
The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.Collection: Beautiful
In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear.Collection: Cherish Every Moment
Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.Collection: Focus
Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are a divine choice.Collection: Gratitude
I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.Collection: Paris
If I had the perspective of the whole, perhaps I'd see it? That which seems evil, is it a cloud to bring rain, to bring a greater good to the whole of the world? Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?Collection: Perseverance
Worry is the facade of taking action when prayer really is.Collection: Prayer
In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.Collection: Rushing
Without God’s Word as a lens, the world warpsCollection: Lenses
In counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life.Collection: Counting
God is patiently transfiguring all the notes of my life into the song of His Son.Collection: Song
Only speak words that make souls stronger -\-\ for once words are spoken, they may be forgiven, but may be not forgotten.Collection: Soul
God gives the world enough of what it needs. All He asks is that we distribute what He gives.Collection: Giving
God appoints people who do disappoint - to point to a God who never disappoints.Collection: People
We want clarity -- and God gives a call. We want a road map --- and God gives a relationship. We want answers -- and God gives His hand.Collection: Hands
And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.Collection: Thanksgiving
Because One died for me that I might breathe this breath...It's all a gift.Collection: Might
The moment when you are most repelled by a child's behavior, that is your warning light to draw the very closest to that child.Collection: Children