Ann Voskamp
Your naked body deserves the honor of being shared only with someone who is covenanted to never stop loving your naked soul.Collection: Loving You
You were made for the place where your real # passion meets # compassion because there lies your real purpose.Collection: Real
How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, the greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction.Collection: Long
You've got to use the life you've been given to give others lifeCollection: Giving
Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.Collection: Children
The prayers we weave into the matching of socks, the stirring of oatmeal, the reading of stories, they survive fire.Collection: Prayer
The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it’s supposed sophistication, it’s cynicism that’s simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks? The sages and prophets, the disciples and revolutionaries, they are the ones up on the ramparts, up on the wall pointing to the dawn of the new Kingdom coming, pointing to the light that breaks through all things broken, pointing to redemption always rising and to the Blazing God who never sleeps.Collection: Wall
Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.Collection: Thanksgiving
God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors. And I've an inkling that there are times when we need to drive a long, long distance, before we can look back and see God's back in the rearview mirror. Maybe sometimes about as far as heaven -- that kind of distance.Collection: Distance
What was intended to harm, God intended it all for good. And no matter what intends to harm you, God's arms have you. You can never be undone.Collection: Arms
I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain...again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless.Collection: Rain
When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?Collection: Rain
On the night He was betrayed Jesus broke bread and lifted it up and gave THANKS. If Jesus can give thanks in that, can we not give thanks in all?Collection: Jesus
A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.Collection: Blessing
Be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness.Collection: Inspirational
You, who were made by Love, made for love-- be still and know and watch love come down.Collection: Love Is
As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible.Collection: Gratitude
Holy joy lies in the habit of murmuring thanks to God for the smallest of graces.Collection: Lying
You can give up the need to compete in the world- when you accept being complete in Christ.Collection: Giving Up
We don't see the material world for what it is meant to be: the means to communion with God.... There is a belief missing, that God is good and that he gives good gifts.Collection: Mean
Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.Collection: Different
[Bill Jensen] shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Book
A year after One Thousand Gifts had released, Kathie Lee Gifford of the Today Show, named it one of her favorite things - the gift that will radically change your life. She shared the title with PEOPLE magazine as one of favorite books - quite astonishing for an evangelical Christian book.Collection: Christian
Kathie Lee [Gifford] invited me to come to New York for lunch with her - and surprised with an unexpected shout out again for One Thousand Gifts on the show and graciously asked a few questions on camera. Indebted to her and the people who read and looked for Jesus in the pages and shared the hope and joy of Him - right where they are.Collection: Jesus
Our [people's] very saving is associated with our gratitude. Which follows: if our fall in the garden was ingratitude, then salvation must be intimately related to giving of thanks.Collection: Gratitude
Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.Collection: Reality
God is always good and we are always loved... even when what He gives may appear ugly.Collection: Giving
Every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God?Collection: Stress
When we know Christ, we always know how things are going to go...always for our good and always for His glory.Collection: Christ
Expose your life to real need. Visit a developing a country. Take a short term mission trip. Write an inmate, send a letter to a sponsored child, serve in the inner city, at a food bank, with a crisis pregnancy center. Make time for shut-ins, the elderly, the sick, the single-parents, the new believers. Just find one way you can make your awareness of your gift-graced life intersect with a real place of need - and Christ in us will do the rest.Collection: Country
I think God calls us to small things, to faithfulness right where we are, to just do the next thing.Collection: Thinking
Gratitude is at the center of a life of faith. It sounds to simple to be true, but isn't that the sign of all deep truth: so simple we're tempted to dismiss it, and so hard, it is exactly what God uses to change our hard lives.Collection: Gratitude
Research actually indicates that if you write down what you're grateful for, it increases your happiness by 25 percent. And who doesn't want that? And God's word says (1 Thessalonians 5), "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Who doesn't want to know exactly what God's will is for them?Collection: Jesus
Life isn't an emergency. Christ is in charge of every moment of the day; nothing catches Him off guard.Collection: Emergencies
Only speak words that make souls stronger.Collection: Soul
You will be most remembered-by what brought you most joy.Collection: Joy
Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.Collection: Fall
Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.Collection: Gratitude
Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks-take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks-and He miraculously makes it more than enough.Collection: Giving
Thanksgiving creates abundance.Collection: Inspirational
We're called to do more than believe in God, we're called to live in God.Collection: Believe
The whole of the life -- even the hard -- is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. 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: Thanksgiving
God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors.Collection: Mirrors
When you're most wounded by words run to the only Word that always brings healing.Collection: Running
Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave. Isn’t that the catalyst of all my sins? Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.Collection: Fall
You love as well as you are willing to be inconvenienced.Collection: Wells