Ann Voskamp quotes:

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  • Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.

  • In a storm of struggles, I have tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But stress can be an addiction, and worry can be our lunge for control, and we forget the answer to this moment is always yes because of Christ.

  • I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

  • The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.

  • By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.

  • Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

  • My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they'd read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.

  • Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.

  • When we can't bottle our tears up anymore, God catches every one in His bottle. God's catching every falling tear because He won't let us fall apart.

  • Gratitude's not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I've spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.

  • Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don't numb themselves to really living.

  • More important than a clean house is a close family.

  • Romance isn't measured by how viral your proposal goes. The Internet age may try to sell you something different, but don't ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness - so don't ever make being viral your goal.

  • I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.

  • Sometimes God answers our questions with questions.

  • Scales always lie. They don't make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.

  • Counting one thousand gifts, I discovered I could count on God.

  • Get this, kids - how a man proposes isn't what makes him romantic. It's how a man purposes to lay down his life that makes him romantic.

  • If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough.

  • Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.

  • Having Christian convictions can't ever negate having Christ's compassion."

  • 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.

  • Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • A lack of doxology leads to depravity.

  • I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

  • be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness

  • How can I help this son of mine see when I can't see? The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they've held their own peace?

  • To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselveswhen we find Him.

  • I don't really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done-yesterday.

  • 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.

  • Like the wind, Grace finds us wherever we are and won't leave us however we were found.

  • We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks. Because how else do we accept His free gift of salvation if not with thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives. Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes! to His grace.

  • I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.

  • Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. Complaint is the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father's heart.

  • Homemaking is about making a home, not about making perfection.

  • 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.

  • God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.

  • 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.

  • The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, the world, is this- all His love.

  • Your naked body deserves the honor of being shared only with someone who is covenanted to never stop loving your naked soul.

  • The prayers we weave into the matching of socks, the stirring of oatmeal, the reading of stories, they survive fire.

  • 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.

  • Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things

  • Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perserverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?

  • God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors.

  • 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.

  • ... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...

  • Going ahead in the midst of the stressful circumstances and giving thanks in that moment - you can't simultaneously feel stress and gratitude at the same time. So as a parent, to go ahead and start to give thanks to God resets the whole family.

  • A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.

  • ...the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.

  • 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.

  • The practice of giving thanks...eucharisteo...this is the way we practice the presence of God, stay present to His presence, and it is always a practice of the eyes. We don't have to change what we see. Only the way we see.

  • Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will.

  • Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

  • 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.

  • Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.

  • Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don't see God, I'll bow down before something else.

  • I am blessed. I can bless.

  • I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

  • A simplified Christmas isn't about circumstances as much as it is about focus.

  • On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgement and effort to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

  • Christian hands never claspand He doesn't give gifts for gainbecause a gift can never stop being a gift - it is always meant to be given.

  • 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.

  • Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks.

  • The real romantics are the boring ones - they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

  • Stress isn't only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.

  • Are stress and worry evidence of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God?

  • The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything.

  • 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.

  • There is unwavering peace today when an uncertain tomorrow is trusted to an unchanging God.

  • 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.

  • Living radical isn't about where you live - it's about how you love.

  • Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.

  • Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

  • Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But it's even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul.

  • Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small - but we aren't sizes. We are souls. There are no better people or worse people - there are only God-made souls.

  • The real romantics imagine greying and sagging and wrinkling as the deepening of something sacred.

  • When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

  • I'm not a fast writer at all. I come empty and wait upon the Lord. So it really is all a waiting process, a patient process.

  • We're not giving what we're called to give, unless that giving affects how we live - affects what we put on our plate and where we make our home and hang our hat and what kind of threads we've got to have on our back. Surplus Giving is the leftover you can afford to give; Sacrificial Giving is the love gift that changes how you live - because the love of Christ has changed you. God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.

  • It is in the dark that God is passing by. The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can't see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us...

  • It's habits that can imprison you and it's habits that can free you. But when thanks to God becomes a habit - so joy in God becomes your life.

  • Busy is a choice. Stress is a choice. Joy is a choice. Choose well.

  • Grace is the only thing that is ever enough.

  • We give thanks to God not because of how we feel, but because of Who He is.

  • I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible.

  • Real joy is not found in having the best of everything but in trusting that God is making the best of everything.

  • You can give up the need to compete in the world- when you accept being complete in Christ.

  • No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.

  • When the heart and mind focus on things unseen - that's when there's a visible change in us.

  • 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.

  • God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.

  • 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.

  • I don't want a Christmas you can buy. I don't want a Christmas you can make. What I want is a Christmas you can hold. A Christmas that holds me, remakes me, revives me. I want a Christmas that whispers, Jesus.

  • 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.

  • You've got to use the life you've been given to give others life

  • 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.

  • Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

  • You, who were made by Love, made for love-- be still and know and watch love come down.

  • That little burning bush that is the signature of the blog - it echoes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's words.

  • The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.

  • I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things . Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.

  • Faith thanks God in the middle of the story.

  • Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love? That Satan's way is more powerful, more practical, more fulfilling in my daily life than Jesus' way? WHy else get angry? Isn't it because I think complaining, exasperation, resentment will pound me up into the full life I really want? When I choose-and it is a choice-to crush joy with bitterness, am I not purposefully choosing to take the way of the Prince of Darkness? Choosing the angry way of Lucifer because I think it is more effective-more expedient-than giving thanks?

  • 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.

  • God is good and I am always loved.

  • When we know Christ, we always know how things are going to go...always for our good and always for His glory.

  • Real Womanhood isnâ??t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father.

  • You will be most remembered-by what brought you most joy.

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