Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

"This. I live in this place, make porridge, scrub toilets, do laundry, and for days, weeks, I am brave and I do get out of bed and I think on this. I study this, the full life, the being fully ready for the end. I start to think that maybe there is a way out of nightmares to dreams? Maybe?"

"Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash"

"Jesus embraced His not enough ... He gives thanks ... and there is more than enough. More than enough. Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle. And who doesn't need a miracle like that everyday? Thanksgiving makes time. The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving creates abundance; and he miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks - ...it's giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough. I am thank-full. I am time-full. page 72"

"Daily discipline is the door to full freedom, and the discipline to count to one thousand gave way to the freedom of wonder and I can't imagine not staying awake to God in the moment, the joy in the now."

"When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here."

"Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held."

"Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on."

"Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied."

"All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no."

"Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community."

"But the irony: Don't I often want to desperately wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness--I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image?"

"I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify."

"Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie. I draw all the hurting voices close and I tough their scars with a whisper: sometimes we don't fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good - until we have the perspective of years. In time, years, dust settles. In memory, ages, God emerges."

"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."

"Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end."

"Eucharisteo means 'to give thanks,' and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received. I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift! I could be the joy!"

"When it gets dark, it's only because god has tucked me in a cleft of the rock and covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I'm falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams. But maybe this is true reality: 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, I-beam supporting in earthquake."

"God holds us in the untamed moments too."

"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."

"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?"