Ann Voskamp
I want a life that makes music - not just practices the piano.Collection: Practice
God’s not out to get you - He’s out to give to you.Collection: Giving
Christian hands never clasp and He doesn't give gifts for gain because a gift can never stop being a gift - it is always meant to be given.Collection: Christian
Love doesn't necessarily mean bless or agree with, it means sacrifice for and suffer with.Collection: Mean
Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace, empty transfigures into full. God wastes nothing – ‘makes everything work out according to his plan.’ (Ephesians 1:11).Collection: Grief
Real Love truthfully sees the flaws - and still really loves fully.Collection: Real
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.Collection: Loss
I began [blogging] because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.Collection: Blogging
Living radical isn't about where you live - it's about how you love.Collection: Where You Live
It’s impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fearCollection: Giving
Sometimes, too often, I don't want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier.Collection: Stress
Love comes softly, it cannot be forced...cannot bear the weight of our expectations. Love always comes in the surrender - in the falling.Collection: Fall
God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.Collection: First Love
I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.Collection: Sleep
Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.Collection: Inspirational
Praying with eyes wide open is the only way to pray without ceasing.Collection: Eye
Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory.Collection: Thinking
But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?Collection: Giving
Hurry always empties a soul.Collection: Soul
Stress isn't only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.Collection: Stress
The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything.Collection: Want
If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips.Collection: Names
Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did. He 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
I think God calls us to small things, to faithfulness right where we are, to just do the next thing. I was simply writing out our family stories in my online journal, scratching out what I want to remember, what I was wrestling out with God.Collection: Wrestling
The bravest love is wildly faithful and it falls hard again every morning... It knows what we seek may be found in what we already have... it's grace and fresh gratitude that can make us strong enough to marvel in the seeming monotony of anything... And the happily married have eyes that look long enough to make the familiar new.Collection: Gratitude
Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.Collection: Doors
I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and I keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt and I could be an expert on the life full, the beauty meat that lurks in every moment. I hunger to taste life. God.Collection: Moving
Poor communication doesn’t disconnect souls. It’s the disconnected souls who poorly communicate.Collection: Communication
Maybe the man who said that his doctor had pulled him off Prozac because One Thousand Gifts and taking the dare to write 1,000 gifts was healing deep places in him and leading him to *experience* joy.Collection: Healing
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.Collection: Heart
Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will.Collection: Joy
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.Collection: Years
Until we call attention to the moments of our lives, we miss our lives.Collection: Missing
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.Collection: Ungrateful
In naming that which is right before me, that which I'd otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.Collection: Missing
The busyness of your life leaves little room for the source of your life.Collection: Littles
Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But its even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul.Collection: Thug
...life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.Collection: Life Changing
I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.Collection: Filling In
God gives us time. And who has time for God?Collection: Giving
They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... God gives us time. And who has time for God? Which makes no sense.Collection: Giving
Every breath is a battle between grudgery and gratitude. Give thanks...and you win joy.Collection: Gratitude
The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story - the reader and the writer.Collection: Heart
How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can't I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy- and seeing shows the way in.Collection: Eye
Remembering with thanks is what causes us to trust - to really believe.Collection: Thanksgiving
When your ethnicity is heaven, then all adversity offers the gift of intimacy, driving you into the home of His heart.Collection: Home
Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leashCollection: Lions
I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] 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: Writing
The message of Christmas is not that we can make peace. Or that we can make love, make light, make gifts, or make this world save itself. The message of Christmas is that this world’s a mess and we can never save ourselves from ourselves and we need a Messiah.Collection: Light