Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 118
August 2, 2018
The Secret You Have To Know When it Seems Like God Doesn’t Hear Your Prayers
A lady flat-out told me today that she’s not going to live through what she’s going through.
What if you’re looking for light at the end of a tunnel — that turns out to be a cave with only a dead end?
A friend whose oldest son drove down the road only to lose control on loose gravel and lose his ability to ever walk or speak again? The very same friend whose husband now just walked out and left her high and dry after 30 years of sleeping spooned together side by side under cotton sheets?
She tells us that lump she found? Is breast cancer. So she has no idea if she can take that full-time career position she just found — but there’s only her to keep the fridge full now.
What if you’re dealt bad hands — and they seem to come from the hand of God?
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Joy Prouty
Levi VoskampAnd then a farmer called the house this morning.
Called to say that those pregnant clouds, heavy with rain, that we were all begging to deliver us into relief from this drought, their dark bellies rolled right on past his parched fields — and left a thousand acres of his corn out there dying of thirst.
What if you’re right parched and God keeps right on passing you by?
What if it feels like your prayers aren’t falling only on deaf ears — but a hard heart?
What if your begging please — feels like ignored pleas?
When I sat on the roof of the Upper Room just the other week in Jerusalem, sat on the rooftop over the room where Christ sat with His people for the Last Supper, sat looking out past the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, toward the Garden of Gethsemane, I pressed open the pages of His letter to us and read it aloud, some of His last words to His gathered followers:
“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word….
I am praying for them.” John 17:6-9
The One who breathes stars breathes prayers for you, the One whose words spoke the world into being uses priceless words over your being, the One who made time, lives beyond time, controls all of time, uses all of His time to pray for you, because you are priceless to Him.
And I broke like clouds over parched places and rained relief.
“I am praying for them.” – Jesus
Though you think no one is praying with you, the Ultimate One is praying for you.
The One who brought you into existence is carrying you in prayer when that existence is brutally hard.
The One who breathes stars breathes prayers for you, the One whose words spoke the world into being uses priceless words over your being, the One who made time, lives beyond time, controls all of time, uses all of His time to pray for you, because you are priceless to Him.
Your prayer warrior is more than any warrior — He is the king of Kings and He has already won.
Jesus lives to endlessly, relentlessly and flawlessly pray for you (Hebrews 7:25), and your prayer partner is the One who possesses all power, and what He is praying for is your protection (John 17:11), your interconnection (11), your God-satisfaction (13), and your always-sanctification. (17-19).
Jesus is praying for your holiness because He knows holiness is your ultimate happiness.
Jesus is praying that you’ll be set apart from what threatens to take part of your heart.
Because He knows: When you just want Him — then you always get just what you want.
Jesus is praying that you’ll be brave when you’re about to break, that you’ll turn from what’s tempting, that you’ll stand against what’s strangling, that you’ll escape into Him instead of trying to escape in a thousand unfulfilling ways.
Hard times don’t need to understand what God’s doing — like they need to know God’s standing with us, that He’s kneeling in prayer for us at all times. Nothing makes your more fiercely brave than knowing Jesus is fiercely praying for you.
Jesus is praying that you’ll be set apart from what threatens to take part of your heart.
Jesus has set aside all of forever to pray that you may be set apart now.
What could matter more? Jesus is praying right now that the Spirit comforts you, strengthens you, anoints you with fresh oil of brave joy.
We can get through anything because Jesus is seeing us through, carrying us through, praying us through. And when we’re struggling to pray, it’s Jesus Himself Who prays for all we’re struggling with. There are arms that won’t let you go, there are plans that won’t abandon you, there are prayers that won’t fail you.
The hand of God finds yours.
We are never alone in the dark — but finally alone with Him.
“Father, I ask that you allow everyone that you have given to me
to be with me where I am!” (John 17:24)
The dark gives way to warming light, because there it is, what breathes blazing hope into any blackness:
Jesus won’t get off His knees until you are in His arms.
The Light carries you especially now.
The post The Secret You Have To Know When it Seems Like God Doesn’t Hear Your Prayers appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
August 1, 2018
When You Need to Know that Your Story is not Over Yet
I am so delighted to welcome Leslie Leyland Fields again, my sister-friend who is coming all the way from Alaska. She’s inviting us all to take an incredible journey with her — to her island in Alaska and across the waters to Galilee and through the gospels, where she has encountered Jesus in dramatic amazing ways. Be sure and watch the video below of this Bible study based on her award-winning book, Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seas. (And, finally, I am crossing the waters to this island as well next month!) It’s a grace to welcome Leslie to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Leslie Leyland Fields
The bread dough feels good under my hands, fleshy and supple as a body.
I’m almost done kneading. This should make ten loaves of whole grain baguettes. I’ve just finished two batches of salmonberry jam.
The kitchen is a disaster, as usual.
In just twenty minutes the fishermen will be in from the nets.
Nine people will fill the doorway and drop to their seats, famished.
Just as I start setting the table, I hear the ATV roaring up to the house and the excited feet of news on the doorstop. “Mom! You gotta come! Isaac and I got a huge halibut! Everyone’s down on the beach!” Micah, 11, my youngest shouts.
I jump down the steps after him. We haven’t had fresh halibut for awhile. They’re flat fish that feed on the ocean bottom, and swim flat like a stingray, moving like a wave. The flesh is flaky and sweet.
Down at the beach, my sons and the fishing crew are standing around the tractor and the prize hanging from the fork lift: a halibut that’s bigger than me.
The beach is alive with color and bodies and happy faces.
We are all delighted that the morning and the ocean delivered something so wondrous to our hands.
Even the word “halibut” is wondrous. It comes from haly, the Old English word for holy, and butt, which referred to any fish that fed on the bottom.
The massive halibut was traditionally saved for the holiest feast days of the Church: Pascha and Christmas. This fish hanging from our tractor is nothing less than a “holy bottom fish.”
My husband Duncan later tells us that the fish is 215 pounds.
For three hours we package the sweet flesh for the freezer to feed us through the winter. For tonight, I decide I will make deep-fried halibut for the ten of us, and for tomorrow, from the scraps, halibut enchiladas. We waste nothing.
A few months later, I traveled to Israel. I spent one day walking to the grassy hillside where Jesus fed the thousands.
Jesus knew what that throng of villagers needed. He had healed every body—and every healed body needs food.
I stood there alone in the silence and emptiness of that field, imagining that feast.
The bread surely was chewy and soft, maybe even warm.
The sardines were dried and salted perfectly.
The hungry ate that miraculous until their bellies bulged, until they could eat no longer. Was there ever such a meal?
But Yeshua was not done. “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted,” He gently urged His disciples.
If I had been there, I would have protested.
Why, Yeshua? When food is sparse, when a god is limited and his miracles cautious and rare—yes, save every crust!
But if you just filled every appetite—and you can do it again and again, why not throw away these leftover crumbs?
And even in the asking, I understand: Don’t waste anything that Jesus has given and multiplied.
And what has He not given and multiplied in my life, in all of our lives?
Over dinner that night, our fish camp table is heaped with two platters of deep-fried holy bottom fish, with green salad, quinoa pilaf, and two loaves of crusty whole grain bread. We sit before the table, salivating. We grab hands, ten of us.
Duncan prays, “Thank you, Lord, for your provision every day, but especially today for this halibut. Be with us the rest of this day. Help us to do our work well.”
I sit at the table with these faces around me—my family, our crewmen, friends. We pass the plates to one another amid laughing, chewing and slurping, and I marvel.
Duncan and I stumbled upon the beach of this island almost three decades ago, from another island, a place we had lived for ten summers.
We came here, to this island with two empty shacks and no one and nothing else.
Before this, I came from five thousand miles away, from my own growing-up houses ruined and cold, with little heat, from tables where food was hard to find and doled carefully to each plate and there was no more.
I didn’t know about miracles.
I didn’t know about Jesus.
I learned to work hard but there was never enough so I held on tightly to whatever I had.
And somehow, despite our own limitations and small faith, God multiplied the work of our hands on this island.
Out of nothing but hope and muscles and prayer, through storm, darkness, and snow, a house emerged from our hands. Then, children came one by one, filling this house, this island, until it throbbed with more living than I knew was possible.
Could anything be better?
Who needed anything more?
And yet there is more.
Out of the overflow, a workshop began a few years ago, with writers coming from everywhere to Harvester Island, harvesting words, multiplying images, stories, books, prayers. An island hillside that once drowned in isolation, loneliness, and even death has become a place of love and art and feasting and life.
The story should end there. But it’s not over yet.
Remember what happened after the meal on that hillside? The satiated masses so desired His power and His food, they tried to capture Him to “force Him to be king.”
They wasted it, this meal.
They missed it, this meal, this sign.
They wanted His food and His power; but they didn’t want Him.
They wanted their nation, but not His kingdom
They wanted supremacy, not humility.
A few hours later Jesus tells them, the ones who didn’t get it, “I AM the bread of life! Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
He wants them to know that He has come not just to feed them lunch but to be their life.
Their bodies are healed and their stomachs are full and Jesus has told them who He is — but they still turn away.
What about me, us? Who does not want the bread Christ feeds us sometimes more than Christ Himself?
Which bread feels more real?
Tonight I look around my table. Look how filled we are!
I am so in love with all that Jesus has given me, so often I want only that.
But take all this away—no children, no husband, no sea, no tables full of halibut and bread and will I love Him still, this Christ?
Can I trust Him to be enough?
I know the answer.
The bread basket passes again. I reach in.
There is one crust left. I pick it up carefully.
I chew it slowly, eyes closed, not wasting a crumb.
Leslie Leyland Fields lives in Alaska and is the happy mother of 6, who have all grown up way too fast. She’s also sent off ten books into the world, including Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seas, and Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers. She’s an international speaker and the founder of The Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, a writing workshop that has welcomed Luci Shaw, Philip Yancey and this year, Ann herself will be Leslie’s guest writer. (Can God really be this good?) Join Leslie for her weekly adventures here.
Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seasis Leslie’s 10th book, and the one most written in blood, saltwater and scales. Through her experience as a mother, a follower of Jesus and a commercial fisherman, Leslie takes her readers on an extraordinary journey beside the disciples as they walked, rowed, and sailed with Jesus. You’ll encounter Jesus anew, and understand more deeply what it means to truly follow Him. (Winner of Christianity Today’s 2017 Book of the Year in Christian Living.)
Ready for the wettest, stormiest, wildest trip through the Gospels you’ve ever taken?
The Gospels are dramatic and incredibly wet, set in a rich maritime culture on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
With the sights and sounds of Alaska as your backdrop and Leslie as your guide, you will gain deeper insight into Jesus and the fishermen who followed Him. This DVD curriculum contains six video teaching sessions filmed on location(!) and based on the award-winning book (with DVD study guide), Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas.
Both the Crossing The Waters book and the DVD curriculum is now discounted at 30% off thru 8/31/18 right here with NavPress.com
The post When You Need to Know that Your Story is not Over Yet appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 30, 2018
When Ordinary People Pray Extraordinary Prayers
Dr. Michael Youssef knows what it’s like to have God call you to something that you aren’t entirely sure you want to do. To feel the pull from God… and walk in the other direction. But he also knows the joy that comes from drawing back to God, following God’s lead, and leaning into the plans God has for us. After heeding God’s call to full-time Christian ministry, Dr. Youssef has discovered his gift for boldly bringing Biblical clarity to today’s issues and he’s been granted the ability to speak to a worldwide audience about the Gospel through his ministry, Leading The Way. It’s a grace to welcome Dr. Youssef to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Dr. Michael Youssef
I received Christ as my Lord and Savior in 1964, and I was immediately on fire for the Lord.
I would go anyplace and tell anyone, even strangers, what Jesus had done for me.
I’m so grateful that God, in His tender mercy and grace, would not let me go.
About two years after my conversion experience, I sensed that God was calling me into full-time Christian ministry—but I didn’t want that! I had plans, I had goals, and they didn’t include becoming a preacher or a missionary.
So, like Jonah, I decided to run from the Lord. I abandoned my faith, stopped witnessing, refused to attend church, stopped praying, and ran from God as fast as I could.
I’m so grateful that God, in His tender mercy and grace, would not let me go.
After about eighteen months, He began drawing me back into His loving embrace through my life circumstances.
Since then, He has led me on an exciting, thrilling adventure of faith beyond anything I could have imagined in my youth.
Today, I look back on the foolish young man I was and think, Why did I imagine I could escape from God?
What if I had remained in a state of rebellion for the rest of my life?
Look at all the blessings of knowing and serving Christ I would have missed .
To think I actually feared God’s will for my life!
I know exactly how it feels to run away from God.
Yet that experience has helped me understand the kind of man Jonah was. I can’t judge Jonah too harshly because I have been in Jonah’s sandals, and I know exactly how it feels to run away from God.
Jonah was a prophet in Israel during the reign of King Jeroboam II. When God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh and prophesy against that city because of the wickedness of its people, Jonah refused.
He took off for the coast, thinking he could somehow flee from the presence of the Lord. He booked passage on a ship bound for Tarshish.
While the ship was at sea, a storm arose. The sailors tried to lighten the ship by dumping their cargo, but they soon suspected that this was no ordinary storm. They determined that the reason for their distress was Jonah.
Jonah admitted that he was to blame for the storm. God was chastening him for his disobedience and his attempt to flee. “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” Jonah said, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you” (Jon. 1:12).
The sailors didn’t want to drown their passenger. They first tried to row back to shore, but the winds and waves were too fierce.
In the end, they prayed to Jonah’s God, asking Him not to hold them accountable for Jonah’s death, and they tossed him into the sea.
Whenever you are in the belly of the beast, and you don’t know how you should pray, pray the Scriptures.
Instantly, the sea became calm, and the sailors became more fearful than ever. None of their gods could calm the sea as Jonah’s God had done.
What happened next is often interpreted as God’s punishment inflicted on Jonah: he sank into the sea and was swallowed by a great fish.
Yes, being swallowed by a fish is an unpleasant and punishing experience. But that fish also saved Jonah’s life.
That fish was a sign of God’s love and mercy to Jonah, as well as a sign of God’s displeasure with his rebellious choices.
While Jonah was in the belly of the fish, he prayed.
If you have been through a storm in your life, if you have found yourself in the belly of the beast, if you are suffering as a consequence of disobedience or even through no fault of your own, then the prayer of Jonah is for you.
A good friend of mine was a great prayer warrior.
People would ask him, “How is it possible for you to pray for an hour and more?”
He would answer, “That’s simple. I don’t do all the talking.”
There are two ways we can let God have His say in our prayers.
One way is by pausing and listening for His voice speaking to us in the stillness.
Another is by praying the Scriptures.
We can read or recite His Word, and we can pray God’s thoughts from His Word as if they were our own thoughts—we can think God’s thoughts after Him.
That is what Jonah did.
Out of his watery grave, he prayed the Scriptures back to God.
Whenever you are in the belly of the beast, and you don’t know how you should pray, pray the Scriptures.
Pray His promises: “Lord, You promised that I can cast all my cares on You, for You care for me. You promised that You would carry my grief and sorrows. You promised to give me joy instead of ashes. You promised that You would never leave me nor forsake me. You told me not to fear, because You are with me. You promised never to give me a spirit of fear but a Spirit of power and love and self-control.”
Have you, like Jonah, forsaken God’s call on your life?
Is God trying to get your attention?
Then come to Him in a spirit of confession, claiming His promise that if you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.
Michael Youssef is the founder and president of Leading The Way with Dr. Michael Youssef, a worldwide ministry that leads the way for people living in spiritual darkness to discover the light of Christ. His weekly television programs and daily radio programs are broadcast in 25 languages and seen worldwide, airing more than 12,000 times per week. Youssef was born in Egypt and lived in Lebanon and Australia before coming to the United States. In 1984, he fulfilled a childhood dream of becoming an American citizen. He holds degrees from Moore College in Sydney, Australia, and Fuller Theological Seminary in California. In 1984, he earned a PhD in social anthropology from Emory University.
They were just ordinary people–a loyal servant, a woman who desperately wanted a child, an old man who still had hope, a young teenager who couldn’t quite believe God’s great love, and others–ordinary people who prayed extraordinary prayers to an extraordinary God. They weren’t always eloquent. They weren’t always the type of person you might think God would listen to. But they trusted God and His plans for their lives, and that made all the difference.
Life-Changing Prayers: How God Displays His Power to Ordinary People tells their stories and shares their desperate, hopeful, and gratitude-filled prayers, inspiring and emboldening us to ask God for the desires of our own hearts. Anyone who desires to pray life-changing prayers, as well as anyone whose prayer life has grown stagnant or nonexistent, will find here the encouragement to pray confidently and expectantly to the God who always hears–and always answers.
[ Our humble thanks to Baker for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
The post When Ordinary People Pray Extraordinary Prayers appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 28, 2018
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.28.18]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you right here:
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
Mary Anne Morgan
cannot get enough of the beauty she captures again and again
stories like these? never, ever get old… #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
airplane turned into a vacation house? some are calling it first class
Looking for a meaningful gift idea? This gift tells a story, helps you stay in The Story, by customizing your Bible covers with your own photos or personal artwork… Kinda really beautiful. Come see?
love this idea here…
When motherhood is overwhelming, I hope you have someone who sees you
sharing the wonder of this monarch sanctuary
Michele Zakeri Photography
Michele Zakeri Photography
Michele Zakeri Photography
can you even?!!? just had to share
so maybe listen up?!? here is what music does to your body
cheering wildly: Teacher leads 4 straight classes to perfect scores on AP Calculus test
this rescued bear is enjoying some tub time!
bakery celebrates 80 years of family ownership:
“My dad has always preached this to me: Remember where you came from…”
perhaps they’re on to something here?!?
Police credit teen’s uplifting notes on bridge for helping “save six lives”
“Even though things are difficult, your life matters; you’re a shining light in a dark world, so just hold on.”
come on! simply: amazing
we circled ’round this one: Bach on the plan for a blind elephant
a story of compassion that just wouldn’t stop giving
God Wrote This Part of Your Story Too: How He Weaves Sorrow into Joy
tears at this kindness: police officer shaves homeless man’s beard so he can land a job
Don’t Glory in Others (John 5:44-45) thank you, David Platt
you’ve got to meet him: Myron Rolle…From Football Safety to Neurosurgeon
this will change how you see people…
Your Marriage is Worth the Work
Post of the week from these parts here
Need a Solution to Trying to Do it All?
if this doesn’t make you stand up, I’m not sure what will?!! thank you, Christine Caine…
5 star: come see how young Julius is giving the homeless a second shot:
“our job is to help them escape that negative cycle” #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
bethany.seibel / Instagram
livingrealmag / Instagram
How do you live a genuinely abundant life?
In sixty vulnerably stories, the tender invitation of The Way of Abundance moves you through your unspoken broken — into the abundant life.
Pick up your own Way to Abundance & start your journey to the abundant life
on repeat this week: God Only Knows
…if we knew what fire every single person is facing, there isn’t even one person we wouldn’t help fight their fire with the heat of a Greater Love.
So…no matter what’s ahead in your day — let’s kinda try this beautiful plan that could make the world a more beautiful place: “Help others get ahead…lend a helping hand.” Phil2:4MSG
Because the thing is? We aren’t here to one-up one another – but to help one another up.
The real hope of this new day is that it is *the Lord helping you* — with all the strength you need for the stretch of just. this. moment.
“Each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms… Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help.” 1Peter4:10NIV, MSG.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
The post Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.28.18] appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 26, 2018
Need a Solution to Trying to Do it All?
Rain on a tin roof this morning.
The rocking chairs out in the ash grove sit quiet, solid — steady in the wind.
Steady in the wind. They’re calling for another inch of rain today, for it to just keep coming.
Our Hope-girl makes brownies, shakes the popcorn over the stove.
And there’s this deep peace that keeps coming about not coming and going at all.
About listening to rain on the roof and riding down the river with the kids on old tractor tubes and picking cherries out in the orchard with the youngest boy and us all smelling like campfire for days.
About sitting on forgotten back gravel roads with our girl who is taller than me now, us licking spoons dipped in strawberry sundaes and watching the storm come in from the west.
About holding babies as light sun warmed pebbles in our arms.
It’s happens when we rest — that we relinquish our ambitions to be like God.
Joy Prouty
There’s always asks to do this thing over here or do this work, this thing, over there.
Asks aren’t obligations. Asks are options.
The Farmer says it quiet to me over bacon and eggs flipped sunny side over: Every yes automatically says no somewhere else.
I say my quiet nos. And we wander away to the woods, pitch tents, walk bare foot, feeling how we’re tents of meeting and holy ground can be anywhere.
After stars come out and we finally zip the last tent flap close, you can hear this growling. You can hear our Hope-girl nudging Shalom dozing off in her sleeping bag: “Shalom — is that your stomach?” Um, no—- that would be two raccoons scrapping like wanna-be bears right on the other side of the tarping plastic, not your sister’s stomach!
So on the Farmer and I wake up in a tent on a leaking air mattress with a rock driving angry into my back and him smiling exhausted from chasing away racoons in the middle of the night — but we have all six of our bed head grinning kids right there around the campfire wanting to know where the sausage is?
Laughing hard over raccoons and growling stomachs and slapping down mosquitoes the size of water buffalo.
And their mama’s standing there like a fool memorizing their faces.
Because it doesn’t matter what any gatekeeper says: Mothering a mess of kids is as important as preaching to a stadium for a month of Sundays.
The size of your ministry isn’t proof of the success of your ministry.
The very Son of God had a ministry to 12. And even oneof them abandoned Him. Forget the numbers in your work. Focus on the net value of your work.
The internet age may try to sell you something different, but don’t ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness — and focusing on numbers can make you nauseated.
Someone sends me this interview that Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi, named by Fortune the #1 most powerful woman in business in the world in 2009 and 2010, and mother of two. Who gave what some are deeming the interview of the year:
“I don’t think women can have it all. I just don’t think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all… Every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions…”
I think about Indra’s Insight while I make decisions in the garden.
While I bend over each strawberry plant, press the delicate white petals between thumb and index finger —and then just pluck it off. So there’ll be no strawberries this year.
It’s what you have to do: “Pick off all first blooms to ensure subsequent harvests are more plentiful.”
If you ever intend for the strawberries to produce heavily throughout the season, you have to choose to sacrifice the first harvest, so that all the growth and energy could be more efficiently invested into producing later crops.
Cut out that which seems good to invest in the best.
It is the law of life: Early sacrifice for later bounty.
I stand over the schedule and there’s Indra’s Insight and there’s this saying no, there’s this trimming back, letting go.
It can be hard to prune good things that are blooming. It can be hard to remember why you are pruning.
Because there’s a counter-intuitiveness to it, this plucking off certain life activities that will yield good fruit. Some might even think it foolish to pare back, when the bloom and gifting apparent; a good harvest inevitable.
Yet it’s the pruning of seemingly good leaves that can grow a better life. To allow later seasons to yield the longed-for abundant crop.
Levi VoskampIt takes courage to crop a life back —but it’s exactly the way to have the best crop of all.
What seems like hard work that’s taking an eternity today — is exactly what may make the most difference in eternity.
Indra’s Insight rings loud. ‘You can have it all’ — isn’t the whole truth.
No matter where you are — it’s never all easy.
A crop is made by all the seasons and the only way to have it all — is not all at the same time… but letting one season bring its yield into the next.
This is how to have no fear — each season makes a full year.
What can seem like a plucking of dreams — may be the wisest of investments. In the later harvest. The sweetest one.
You can see it when you pluck the strawberries, hoe the beans, cut the lettuce, when you stand there in the thickening dusk:
You can see that the garden is one and the garden is a myriadof plants flourishing in their own space, their own way, their own time. Heaven forbid that you’d try to make all the cherry tomatoes into zucchini plants.
Heaven forbid any woman would go around and try to make all women into an image of herself.
Heaven forbid any woman would set up her life as a standard instead of making grace the standard of her life.
One woman’s thrift store donation is happily another woman’s thrift store sensation. And one woman’s ‘no’ can happily be another woman’s ‘yes’. One isn’t necessarily wrong and the other one right.
It’s the differences between us that makes us a Body and not a uniform.
Christ makes us a Body — not a faith factory. He calls us to be Christ followers — not cookie cutters. Break the measuring sticks of comparison — or we break our own souls.
Because the bottom line simply is: If you aren’t encouraging women to live out their particular calling, you may just be idolizing a particular idealized form of yourself.
Malakai carries in a bowl of rain wet spinach from the garden. The tomatoes are still flowering, the peppers shooting up.
There’s this fierce trust that the Spirit will bring the bounty of a feast in His time to feed and grow the Body in His way.
And yeah — we each get to make our own unique decisions knowing we’ve heard God’s unique calling for us.
People will always have opinions about you. But you live for God because He’s the only one who has intimate knowledge of you.
Hope and I wash the kitchen down while the brownies cool.
The sun breaks through. The roof falls silent now. Rocking chairs still in the grove, armrests dripping soundlessly. Steady in wind. Knowing what they’re about. The evening light falls long and quiet across the counters.
People will always have opinions about you. But you live for God because He’s the only one who has intimate knowledge of you.
There are crops finally coming to maturity — yeses and nos coming in their own right time.
Often the evidence of maturity is responsability…. response-ability — the ability to make the right response at the right time.
“You want to have one of the brownies out in one of the rockers with me?” Hope looks up from the tap, her cloth in hand.
And there are holy yeses that are just to the one.
To a girl at the sink with a bunch of flowers.
The post Need a Solution to Trying to Do it All? appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 25, 2018
Where Hard Things and Faith Intersect
Kia Stephens candidly shares perspective from the unedited pages of her Christian experience. As a wife, mother, and a woman who has tasted disappointment she connects with a broad range of readers. Today she is sharing how she is presently learning to abide at the place where her faith intersects with the hard things in life. It’s a grace to welcome Kia to the farm’s front porch today…
The time on the dashboard read 8 o‘clock as my car reached the driveway.
I was tired.
The kids were hungry and I still had to have a much needed phone conversation.
It was one that couldn’t be avoided any longer.
In fact, it was an overdue chat with my father’s insurance company: hashing out details for primary care providers, co-pays and home health. I imagined I would be taking the wheel for my parent’s medical well-being at some point, I just didn’t think it would be at 39.
Life, however, had other plans.
Most days I feel emotional, fatigued, and inadequate.
I am the only daughter of my Haitian born father and helping him navigate the American Healthcare system is necessary.
So I made the call and began a journey I was not, nor am I presently, prepared for. It took over an hour to have this three-way chat between the insurance representative, my father and me.
When it was done I wept, not knowing it was the first of many more tears.
This journey requires me to schedule appointments and follow up with doctors out of state while juggling responsibilities for my family of four.
Most days I feel emotional, fatigued, and inadequate.
It can be hard to be diligent in the difficult, faithful while unseen, and brave in the unknown.
This is especially true when you find yourself not at the starting point or finish line of life’s unexpected twists, but somewhere in the middle. Marked by fatigue, this is the place you want to quit but somehow muster the stamina to endure.
I have watched many people arrive here.
My colleague did when her husband died suddenly.
My neighbor did when she lost not one, but two children at birth.
My friend did when she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer at age 35.
Hard things dawn everyone’s doorstep at some point. Unannounced and abrupt, they sashay in as if invited. Sometimes coming in our childhood when we are most vulnerable. Other times making a grand entrance in adulthood, shattering every ideal we had about how life should be. Sometimes they stay indefinitely.
No one is immune. Everyone, at some point will encounter adversity.
Initially, we may be in shock: dismayed by trouble’s audacity. We might even battle with bouts of anger. In time, discouragement may set in – blurring and preventing us from seeing life through a balanced lens.
Have you ever been there?
Are you there now?
Given the year we’ve had, I’m assuming the answer to one or both of these questions might be yes.
Just this year we’ve experienced political unrest, catastrophic natural disasters, public scandal, and unbearable racial tension. When we factor in our personal challenges these realities are enough to superglue us to a pit of pessimism and hopelessness.
I am tempted to rent a uhaul, pack up all my stuff, and take up residence in this spot but something inside me is discontent with despair: telling me, sometimes screaming – if need be – “We cannot stay here!”
I am convinced it’s hope; she is relentless: often pursuing us when we don’t pursue her.
Her pursuit gently nudges us to pry ourselves from the makeshift shelter we’ve erected and venture a little further to the place where hard things intersect with our faith. Here, amid the confusion and emotional wreckage, we wrestle with reality and the God who defies it.
Peace happens once we accept God’s sovereignty in light of our inability to control the outcome.
We can’t control outcomes.
I am learning this as a grapple with 39: finding myself dealing with compounding hard things. Maybe you do too. God’s peace, however, offers us comfort in the unresolved circumstances of our lives.
It is not a comfort that dismisses pain, rather it is one that says, “Come. Rest. Weep. Abide”.
In doing so, we taste a little of what the apostle Paul prayed for the Roman church in Romans 15:13 (NIV), “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Paul reminds us that hope originates with God. This hope is not rooted in perfect circumstances or our ideals.
On the contrary, this hope is rooted in Christ, His sacrifice for us, and the promise of being united with Him one day when all hard things cease.
As much as I want a life void of difficulties, Christianity is not challenge-free.
Christ, Himself endured incredible trials while depending on His heavenly Father for the strength to finish His assignment here on earth.
He demonstrated what faith should look like.
As we trust God, He fills us with joy and peace until we overflow with hope.
The trusting proceeds the filling.
When hard things strike, although our natural response is to fix it or flee, God gives us the choice to trust Him with the outcome.
In doing so, we learn how to abide and rest at the place where hard things intersect with our faith.
Unexplainable peace is found here.
Kia Stephens is a wife and homeschooling mama of two who is passionate about helping women know God as Father. For this reason, she created The Father Swap Blog to be a source of encouragement, healing, and practical wisdom for women dealing with the effects of a physically or emotionally absent father. Each week through practical and biblically sound teaching she encourages women to exchange father wounds for the love of God the Father.
For more encouragement download Kia’s FREE ebooks, Hope for the Woman With Father Wounds and Forgiveness Hacks: 5 Strategies to Help You Forgive.
The post Where Hard Things and Faith Intersect appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 23, 2018
The Key to Thriving Through Hard Things and Creating the Life You Long For
Ruth Chou Simons is a friend who gently encourages and reminds me to live with purpose and intention every day. She began sharing her artwork on social media while searching for God’s grace laced throughout her days. With each stroke of the brush, she learned that when you take time to record your grateful thoughts, and when you plan your days with purpose, you sow seeds of life into the very soil of your heart. Her new books GraceLaced Seasons and GraceLaced 17-month Planner help you reap the harvest of your heart as you learn to live with intention in seasons of pause and of plenty. Ruth’s work continually points me to grateful appreciation and deeper understanding of our Creator and the craftsmanship of His hand. It’s a grace to welcome Ruth to the farm’s front porch today…
guest post by Ruth Chou Simons
You are a gardener, you know.
From sunup to sundown, you work to cultivate a thriving garden .
Maybe you have packets of mothering seeds,
some marriage-building seeds,
or even some enterprising seeds.
You have big hopes and dreams, but the soil you have to work with may not be as yielding as you had imagined.
Your land of affliction is the very ground the Lord is using for your good and His glory.
Perhaps the lines in this season for you have not fallen in pleasant places, as the psalmist says for himself:
“The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” (Psalm 16:6)
But are rather marked by trials and affliction.
You look over the fence and see the array of color and beauty in your neighbor’s garden while your hand is to the plow, working to break through the soil of your own.
Do you remember the story of Joseph in the Old Testament—how he was mistreated, falsely accused, forgotten, and made to wait? Thirteen years wrongly imprisoned and a total of 22 years before he was reconciled with his betraying brothers.
Joseph knew what it felt like to not know resolution, not see justice, not see his life in bloom the way he had envisioned .
You don’t have to be blooming to be growing, so don’t give up.
I’ve been finding comfort in Joseph’s story lately (if you haven’t read Genesis 42–50 recently, you should!), and it has brought assurance to a season of pain and impossible situations in my own life.
As I read these chapters, it’s easy to assume the climax of Joseph’s story is his brothers seeking forgiveness at the end, because that’s what we long for—glorious blooms.
But that wasn’t the lesson the Lord taught Joseph.
Instead, Joseph focused on the sovereignty of God at work in the midst of his prolonged suffering.
He rested in God’s purposes when he could have been bitter toward his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people” (Genesis 50:20 NLT).
God demonstrating His glory through your dependency is your real story, and He’s writing it day by day through deepening roots and newly formed buds.
Joseph fixed his eyes on the ultimate purpose of his affliction: to know the Lord’s faithfulness to accomplish His will in and through a life dependent on Him .
“For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction” (Genesis 41:52 NKJV).
You see, the colorfully dazzling bloom is only one part of anyone’s story.
Blooms are not the only way to see God’s faithfulness.
He is actively growing you, friend, while you sow within the hard soils of affliction.
You don’t have to be blooming to be growing, so don’t give up .
God demonstrating His glory through your dependency is your real story, and He’s writing it day by day through deepening roots and newly formed buds.
Blooms will come because He’s faithful to finish what He begins in us:
“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring
it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 1:6)
But even if you don’t see it today, take heart.
Your land of affliction is the very ground the Lord is using for your good and His glory.
Ruth Chou Simons is an artist, writer, entrepreneur, and speaker. As author of the bestselling book GraceLaced and creator of the popular GraceLaced online shoppe, blog, and Instagram community, she shares scriptural truths daily through her hand-painted artwork and words. Ruth and her husband, Troy, live on the western slope of Colorado and are grateful parents to six sons—their greatest adventure.
GraceLaced Seasons provides encouraging Scripture and beautiful art to help you delve deeper into the GraceLaced experience. You will find plenty of space to record your sincere thoughts, humble gratitude, and heartfelt prayers. Each guided question is crafted to lead you through Ruth’s stunning bestseller, GraceLaced, to experience how each day becomes a reason to pour praise out to your Creator.
Approach each new day with purpose with the GraceLaced 17-month Planner.
Led by truth from God’s Word, it will help you organize your schedule and embrace the changing seasons of your heart.
[ Our humble thanks to Harvest House for their partnership in today’s devotion ]
The post The Key to Thriving Through Hard Things and Creating the Life You Long For appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 21, 2018
Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.21.18]
Happy, happy, happy weekend!
Some real, down in the bones JOY to celebrate today! Links & stories this week 100% guaranteed to make you smile a mile wide & believe like crazy in a Good God redeeming everything — and that there’s love everywhere & for ((you))!
Serving up only the Good Stuff for you right here:
Matt Trivett
Matt Trivett
Matt Trivett
he captures our planet like no one else I know
because sometimes? we all need a dip in a pool on a very hot day
cheering wildly at this!! A teacher on a plane talked about her low-income students. Passengers overheard and collected this…
his curiosity for the world takes this 71 year old kayaker far and wide
heart fireworks: Bicyclist Carries Wounded Dog on His Back, Finds Him Forever Home
so they’re saying? Dancing can reverse braining aging!?
Looking for a meaningful gift idea? This gift tells a story, helps you stay in The Story, by customizing your Bible covers with your own photos or personal artwork… Kinda really beautiful. Come see?
perfect (free) summer adventure (grab your favorite people and some pillows and look up!): How to find the summer constellations
we circled ’round this one: the fascinating behind the scenes look at how they photograph sharks and lions
brilliant idea: Pianos in the Parks lets everybody tickle the ivories
the power of a lawn mower and a good deed #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
ok, now THIS: Couple Adopts 6 Kids Who Are Blind and Have Special Needs
in their 60’s, they realize they will never retire or have a home without kids
so much love: perhaps the greatest gift a teacher can receive
Your Morning Will Come: Trusting God in the Darkest Nights
tears at this one — what can we go do? #BeTheGift #TheBrokenWay
This is the most profoundly moving piece I have read in a very long time. Absolutely anointed, in the truest sense of the word:
Give People Dignity the World Has Taken Away
when he found out his employee walked 20 miles to work? yup: He gave him his car
Being Okay With Not Being Okay
“The first thing you must realize, as you look at that mountain which you are told you must ascend, is that you cannot do it, that you are utterly incapable in and of yourself, and that any attempt to do it in your own strength is proof positive that you have not understood it.”
you’ve got to meet her: What a story! At 84? she’s a track and field champ like no other
“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.
When power corrupts, poetry cleanses” ~JFK
Helen Mirren Reads the poem ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson to An Emotional Stephen Colbert
“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
Makes me weep. Can I believe what you say?
Post of the week from these parts here
How 3 Words can Stop What’s Stealing Your Joy: Instead of Staying Stuck In Comparing & Competing
can you even?!!? because we all need each other
mann_nz/Instagram
dbobbit/ Instagram
How do you live a genuinely abundant life?
In sixty vulnerably stories, the tender invitation of The Way of Abundance moves you through your unspoken broken — into the abundant life.
Pick up your own Way to Abundance & start your journey to the abundant life
on repeat this week: Catch the Wind
…if we knew what fire every single person is facing, there isn’t even one person we wouldn’t help fight their fire with the heat of a Greater Love.
So…no matter what’s ahead in your day — let’s kinda try this beautiful plan that could make the world a more beautiful place: “Help others get ahead…lend a helping hand.” Phil2:4MSG
Because the thing is? We aren’t here to one-up one another – but to help one another up.
The real hope of this new day is that it is *the Lord helping you* — with all the strength you need for the stretch of just. this. moment.
“Each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms… Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help.” 1Peter4:10NIV, MSG.
[excerpted from our little Facebook family … come join us each day?]
That’s all for this weekend, friends.
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.
Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joy, re- joy, ‘re- joys’ again
Share Whatever Is Good.
The post Only the Good Stuff: Multivitamins for Your Weekend [07.21.18] appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 18, 2018
You + Hard Thing = Not Talking To God (or The Silence where God Speaks)
When Hilary Yancey first learned that her son would have significant physical differences, she asked God to heal him, expecting to tell a story of miracles. She is telling a story of miracles, yes, but ones far different from what she expected in the quiet nights before her son was born. And as she writes of the journey from ultrasound to NICU, from NICU to home, and from silence with God to a new beginning, she prays that Jesus would walk out on that rising water to meet you. It’s a grace to welcome Hilary to the farm’s front porch today…
In the dark the numbers glowed, tiny lanterns that blurred at the edges of my eyes.
I held my son and his nest of wires, a tube taped to the edge of his mouth, one wrapped around his toe, a glimmer of red peeking through his papery skin, and three taped to his chest, under the white t-shirt with frayed edges, designed to fit my son and his friends, unnamed babies with stories I barely imagined.
He was warm against my chest, and I marked his breaths, the rise and fall of his ribcage, praying each time that the alarms would stay silent, praying for a noiseless hour.
For weeks that fell into months, I kept silent. I kept away from God as I believed He was keeping away from me.
We lived in the NICU to make room for my son to breathe as easily as a bird takes flight.
He had surgery to place a tracheostomy tube, his chest rising and falling in perfect rhythm. We learned to gently clean the skin around the stark white tube, we learned to make him safe with sterile gloves and a suction machine.
Finally, the alarms quieted and we were released.
The silence—what had once been my only prayer—lingered.
Where had I left my beliefs? By the door of the OR, the hospital bed where I had pressed my son into the world, the highway that led us home?
And where was the God Who promises that if we knock, He will answer, the door opening to encounter Him?
For weeks that fell into months, I kept silent.
I kept away from God as I believed He was keeping away from me.
I had spent all that I had in prayer before my son was born, and now my heart was hemorrhaging the expectations I had built up that those prayers would be granted, like wishes from a genie or coins tossed into a well behind my back.
Prayers are not wishes; prayers are conversations. God does not grant but God gives,God is not summoned, but God speaks.
How often I had prayed, I told no one in particular, hoping perhaps that God would overhear my conversation.
Hadn’t I asked only for protection, for health, for healing?
Hadn’t I done what all mothers do for their children and pray them into safety and happiness?
I kept a count of my prayers from the months before. I tallied them up into journals and then scratched out the pages.
When my son smiled for the first time, I prayed thanksgiving before I realized I was still too angry to pray, and I hoped that God had not heard me even as I hoped somewhere deeper down that He had.
I built my complaint against God in secret, in these scratched-out journal pages and conversations sitting alone on my front porch as the lights of the other houses came on one by one.
I built up the list of what God had not done, how He had forgotten me, my well-deserved dream-come-true, my just-as-expected life.
It broke open the first time that my son held my hand.
It was a few weeks after his cleft lip surgery, his smile still new, fragments of surgical glue still drifting onto my shirt when I held him close.
In the heat of the afternoon sun I held him in the gray rocking chair and his tiny fingers found the edge of my hand and he fastened onto me.
There is no one right way to speak to God, no guarantee of answers or outcomes, but the words themselves will take on life as they leave your lips, they will find their way to Jesus, they will be heard.
And all at once I had a thousand words and they poured out of me, and I told Jesus all that He had not done and all that I thought He would do.
I spoke out loud what had never been a secret to God. My son held fast to my hand, leading me out onto the water again.
There is no one right way to speak to God, no guarantee of answers or outcomes, but the words themselves will take on life as they leave your lips, they will find their way to Jesus, they will be heard.
And now I ask Jesus questions that sit between us, answered and unanswered and being answered.
I feel my arms widen to hold my son, whose legs grow long and lanky, feet dangling over my knees – and I feel my heart widen to hold new hopes, hopes that grew in the shape of the boy in my arms, not the wishes or coins or expectations I once had.
The silence of God is still a knife carving out the space where I once kept Him.
It still stings and it still sings with the promise that if I linger, if I dare to speak, if I knock and keep knocking, He will speak back.
Hilary Yancey is a writer and philosopher living in Waco, Texas with her husband Preston and two children, Jackson and Junia.
In her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith, Hilary journeys through her old, familiar faith to the God behind it. As she walks through her son’s diagnosis with physical disabilities, their six-week stay in the NICU, and the unfamiliar road home, she discovers that by walking out onto the water, where the firm ground gives way, we can find Jesus.
And meeting Jesus, who rises with his scars to proclaim new life, is never what you once imagined.
The post You + Hard Thing = Not Talking To God (or The Silence where God Speaks) appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
July 16, 2018
How 3 Words can Stop What’s Stealing Your Joy: Instead of Staying Stuck In Comparing & Competing
So, yeah, this kid?
She’s apparently got a problem when it’s her kid sister’s birthday.
And honestly… it’s sorta understandable.
I mean — who really especially likes it, or finds it easy — when the other kid gets the big cake?
Or the big gifts. Or all the flashing cameras on her grinning mug smiling pretty over candles?
I saw it once at a parade: women jockeying for a better position.
Turns out it doesn’t matter a hill of beans how old you are, how wise you are, or how you’re sitting pretty — the more you let yourself compete and compare, the more you forget your own calling.
I’d seen it, the women with their big handbags and big hopes: The more you push to get in front of others, the more you fall behind in being the best you can be.
I confess, I don’t remember much of the parade… but I went home with that.
I went and listened to the kid with the kid sister who had this birthday coming up. She was brave and honest and said out loud that she knew she was going to feel her tummy tighten into knots when everyone handed her sister all the presents, when her sister got the stage and the candles and the cake.
So she showed me what her and her mom had written on a piece of paper for her, for her to carry in her pocket, hold in her hand.
Just three words, scrawled on a scrap of paper:
I get enough.
I get enough.
The kid’s eyes dance:
“So I remember: I get enough cake, I get enough pretty gifts, I get enough people celebrating me too.”
That little girl holds that paper up: “I am not ever losing this. Because I can’t forget it — or that’ll ruin everything: I get enough.”
That’s right, girl — because a girl can forget. And that ruins everything.
A woman can forget that her life is enough. That her road is enough. That her calling, her story, her singleness, her chastity, her marriage, her husband, her vocation, her apartment, her house, her childlessness, her kids, her body, her health, her work is enough.
A woman can look in the mirror and find it impossible to say: I get enough.
One can forget how to believe: I get enough.
There’s enough scraps of paper in the world, that we could all tear up that myth of scarcity and write it down for ourselves, the certainty of abundance: I get enough.
One can write it on the mirror:
I get enough… because I get enough Jesus — and Jesus for me is enough.
I get enough… because I get enough God — and God in me is enough.
I get enough… because I get enough grace — and His grace to me is enough.
I get enough… because I get enough Love — and His Love all around me, for me, in me, is enough.
I get enough.
When I can’t remember that I get enough — I just have to remember to give thanks.
Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle:
Give thanks — and you get the miracle of knowing that you do get enough. You get enough God.
The disease of not-enough… is cured when you give thanks for more than enough grace.
Sometimes you need shorthand to help you remember what matters in the long run.
Shorthand for ‘I get enough’ is: 1000 gifts.
It’s been given, 1000 gifts, endless gifts, more than enough gifts:
“He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all — how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?
If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing Himself to the worst by sending His own Son — is there anything else He wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?” (Romans 8:32, NIV, MSG)
If God already gave us the extraordinary extravagance of Jesus — He will give the ordinary enough of right now.
It’s always our relentless desire for more — that destroys more and more of us.
The more you want —- the more you will be destroyed.
But when we know we get enough — we get happy for what others get.
That, always that in the pocket: I get enough… because I get enough Jesus — and for me, Jesus is enough.
Some part of the art of life is the art of believing — that the grace in the pocket is sufficient for today, that the celebration and the feast is wide enough to encircle all of you too, that the candles light you too.
When the kid sister laughed over those birthday candles, you could see a pinpoint of light in everyone’s eyes, like the light of more than enough stars that you could see even right now, right now in broad daylight.
If we’d just pause to look up.
Heart stories of the everyday,
to give a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace,
a way of being present to God that makes you deeply happy,
and a way of living that is finally fully alive.
Come make your life the best dare of all!
Pick up our story of discovering enough… of The Broken Way and how to love a brokenhearted world.
This one’s for all of us who have felt our hearts break a bit…
This one’s for the brave and the busted and the real and dreamers and the sufferers and the believers.
This one’s for those who dare to take The Broken Way… into abundance — into the real enough.
The post How 3 Words can Stop What’s Stealing Your Joy: Instead of Staying Stuck In Comparing & Competing appeared first on Ann Voskamp.
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