Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 252

How to Really Kick off the Holidays: Come to Christmas at the Farm!

She’d first come up this unexpected way last spring.

Right about when that ancient lilac bush out front of the house had feebly offered up it’s last tired crop of blooms, like some old lady bent on beauty right till the end.

I’d filled up some old crocks with the scented purple and got a big roast of pork in the oven and we’d flung open the front door, kicked the pile of shoes out of the way, and the kids had all piled on her with too many questions and way too many lame and limping jokes straight out of the hardly-witty column of the farm paper. And she’d laughed glory, right there in the mingling of the pork and the lilac.

When a woman burns all her measuring sticks, she can ignite with glory. I just flat out love Lizzie.

So her and I, Lizzie and Annie, we wrote all through the spring — about Christmas.

I prayed her through the final readings out loud of Women of Christmas on her porch.

She said she wanted to make sure every word could beat in time with a woman’s heart.

And Lizzie prayed me through the last pages of The Greatest Gift, as I wrote across the ocean, en route to Uganda and a little girl named Anna and a brave woman named Katie.

I said I wanted to make sure every page murmured, “Don’t miss Me — I want you.“

We were two sisters, writing about our Father, praying each other through.

We were two sisters praying for all our sisters to know the embrace of their Father and how He carries us all through. We were two sisters who’d burned the measuring sticks and prayed for God to make us all flames, burning bushes of glory.

Your sisters know the beat of your heart when you have forgotten how to be.

Your sisters know the lyrics of why you are loved — when you can’t remember quite how to live….

Your sisters will sing your song — God’s song for you — when you have long forgotten the words to His Word – to yourself.

Your sisters want you to come – 

Your sisters want you to gather with sisters from all over the world for the free webcast, Christmas at the Farm — a place for sisters to unwrap the full love story of Christmas. A place for sisters to pause before the season begins and focus on the love our hearts can rush right past and forget…

Your sisters want you to come… 

You breathe different in a room when you know it’s not about the good you can accomplish but about the grace you can accept.

You breathe different through a season when you begin it by breathing in grace —  when you begin it in a place just to be real. Only then can we begin to be changed this season into the realest versions of  Grace Himself.

November 21st. 12 Noon EST. The webcast Christmas at the Farm: Liz Curtis Higgs, this crazy farm hick, and you — and laughter. Cookies. Recipes. Memories. The Word. Jesus.

And the free download/printable: The (Startlingly) Simple Steps to a Sane and Sacred Christmas. 

Come over the hills and fields of snow — for Christmas at the Farm with Lizzie and Annie? and a whole lot of Jesus. 

Before the seasons gets kick started into high gear — maybe your soul really needs the gift of this?  Of Him.

This could be Christmas like you’ve never quite experienced before — but have always been yearning for. 

Because sometimes, even in the coming of winter –

spring can unexpectedly come and enfold you like a newborn child bent on loving you to whole.

 

Kick off the Holidays with Christmas at the Farm!

Add Christmas at the Farm to your calendar?

Lizzie and Annie would love to meet you — Gather some sisters to come too?

(Whole church families have let us know they are inviting women to just bring their brown bag lunches for lunch, and are gathering together for  Christmas at the Farm to kick off the holidays.) November 21st. 12 Noon. 

{Right here on Nov. 21. Free webcast from the Farm. Live chat with Liz Curtis Higgs and Ann Voskamp. Free Printable: How to have a Sane and Sacred Christmas. Recipes. Memories. Music. The Word. And a whole lot of Jesus — a whole lot of what your soul really needs before the season begins… }

Add to Calendar

Or, add to:

Reads for a Meaningful Christmas:

Lizzie’s perfect Women of Christmas

Annie’s The Greatest Gift

This could be Christmas like you’ve never quite experienced before — but have always been yearning for. 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How to Put One Foot in Front of the Other

Some guy I ran into said you should walk through life as though your feet are kissing the earth.

I tell him he really shouldn’t use the word should.

Yeah, the irony of that is not lost on me.

But, hey, neither is the sharp edge of his point: The week that a couple thousands people are washed away by walls of raging water – screaming toddlers with big eyes and wrinkled grandmothers who went without a word — maybe walking this earth like every step is a kiss of thanks is good theology.

Maybe watching the news and lingering on a face and being brave enough to let a calloused heart feel the ache of humanity again makes you press your heel differently into this soft earth.

Maybe kissing the earth with your footsteps is what wakes you to a touch of grateful passion again. Tell me that’s vapid poetry. Somebody – somebody walking with a limp– might just tell you that it’s your cynicism that’s rabid stupidity. You could go ahead and laugh back. I’m only partially embarrassed to tell you that I almost laughed at the guy telling me how to walk too – except that prophets almost ways get laughed at.

I thought I walked differently after Haiti. After Guatemala and Ecuador and Uganda. I thought the arch of my foot embraced the planet under me with this startling awareness of wild, unmerited grace. People had stood in the foyer after the Sunday sermon, sliding their kid’s arms into jacket sleeves, asking me how the trip had gone and before I had groped for words to stuff impossible thing into, they had neatly concluded, “Sure makes you grateful, huh?”

I’ve said it myself. Looked at the footage of people in need, walked through dumps and kids looking for food amidst garbage and heard people say it: “You can’t help but be grateful.”

As if God uses slums and shanties and the starving merely as this cosmic Sunday School visual aid to make a bunch of the spoiled kids grateful. As if gratitude is this virtue that can neatly scrub away any inconviencing responsibility, as if gratitude can quietly get us all off some uncomfortable hook.

Knee-jerk gratitude never changed how anyone walked. Knee-jerk gratitude just leaves your life cramped small.

In a world of need, it’s too easy to think that static gratitude is our only responsibility — instead of feeling gratitude as the electric current empowering our ability to actually respond.

To actually do something. To actually walk, live, move, respond, go into this world as though our feet are kissing the grace of the ground under us and God over us, going as an embrace to those in need.

How do you grab every person getting off a plane from some short term mission trip, how do you write it over every thanksgiving table, how do you grab yourself in the mirror first thing? Gratitude isn’t some neat Pollyanna period in a Life Mission Statement – Gratitude is the demanding question mark.

Gratitude is the demanding question mark in the grammar of your life – otherwise your life needs editing.

So you are grateful & —- ??

So you are grateful & — ?? What are you going to do?

So you are grateful & —?? How now will you live?

Thanksgiving that doesn’t become thanksliving isn’t thanksgiving. It’s thanksdead. It’s thanksnothing.

That band name – Grateful Dead? Don’t let any record store tell you different — there’s no such thing as the grateful dead. The Grateful can never live deadened, status quo lives.

The Grateful living know that Knee-Jerk gratitude cramps your life small – but Lifestyle Gratitude enlarges you to run the race of faith. Lifestyle Gratitude is about lives poured out – which makes you live larger and makes you live greater and makes you live more fully alive.

The Grateful are the great fuel of world change.

Eucharisteo – thanksgiving – always, always precedes the miracle.

I hang that as a sign– a two foot-long sign— so I can see it from the sink.

I figure this is how I learn to walk, to put one foot in front of the other.

Who wants only a month of giving thanks for gifts, when you could have a life of being the gift; who wants only a holiday with a feast, when you could have a lifestyle that is a feast.

I just need a way to walk – a way to walk through a messy house and hormonal teenagers and these few short days before it’s all over here and I’m skull and bones and whatever legacy I chose.

So I’m just fool enough to doggedly keep choosing the messiness of Eucharisteo, the gratitude with a question mark that demands an answer with my life and each line of eucharisteo, on a sign, on a card, supports mothers and babies in Haiti through Compassion, a Child Survival Program where women learn to read and write words.

And I look at the faces of these women, our sisters, our women, the very ones that this one line about eucharisteo, thanksgiving, is helping to change their lives, and I get how words can get into your veins and change your life.

Look into the eyes our mothers in Haiti who get food to keep their babies alive and learn how to nurture their small bodies and souls and minds, this Compassion center where mothers make and create to express and heal and feed their families. And I look into their eyes and get how that can get under your skin and change how you live, how you walk.

There are simple ways you can hang what you believe so you can give what you believe.

What if the question around holiday tables wasn’t – What are you so grateful for? But rather How are you changing the world because you are so grateful?

What if gratitude always meant a question mark — asking how will you let your gratitude to Christ mark the world for Christ?

I want to go find that guy I ran into, that prophet that no one’s laughing at now, and tell him I’m getting that too — that a Thanksgiving that never moves into hands and feet and out into the world was never really Thanksgiving in the heart.

I want to tell him that yeah, sometimes we don’t even know how to walk, let alone how to make every step like a grateful kissing the earth. I want to tell him about these severely autistic children I’d read about who couldn’t even stand, let alone walk, and that there are a whole lot of us sort of like this.

Tell him how someone got the bright idea to slip a rope through all of these kids’ hands together and help them to their feet — and together the kids could walk across the room. Together they could stand, together they could put one foot in front of the other.

The rope got thinner. Until it was invisible fishing line. But the kids got stronger. They kept gripping — together. They kept walking together.

Then someone got the idea to cut the fishing line into foot long lengths and hand these foot-long lengths to the kids. And they still walked. One steady foot in front of the other – nearly invisible foot-long lengths in their hands.

They figured out how to walk because they felt like they were holding on to one line, holding on to one line together.

A hundred times a day, I look at my little half-foot sign and figure out how to put one foot in front of the other and walk out into the world because thanksgiving is a verb – a way to walk, to respond, to give, to do, to change the world.

I want to tell that guy I ran into that I get it – that I get that Thanksgiving always moves into Christmas, because thanksgiving always moves out into the world as giving, that there are invisible threads holding us all together, that there are lines that we can hold on to, that hold us together.

That the way you walk, it could kiss more than the earth — it could kiss the Creator of the earth. It could kiss the kid across the table, the woman across town, the hurting mother across the world.  

That there could be this walking together that holds us together, us all walking embraced.

 

 

 

Partnering with Dee at Red Letters, with 100% of all profits to support 50 mothers and their babies in need in Haiti through Compassion’s Child Survival Program:

Eucharisteo Gallery Wrap Canvas Art Print - 

Eucharisteo Greeting Cards - 

Eucharisteo 5×5 Cafe Mount - 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Why the Best Response to Life, the Holidays, Anything is: Yada, Yada, Yada

‘Whatever.”

The Wednesday morning before turkey and pie and black Friday flyers, I wake up to this smothering of fog and this teen muttering it through the kitchen: “Whatever.”

And what do you say but that’s not quite the way to start off the day, and he shrugs his shoulders and slams the bathroom door behind him, and I get it.

It’s there on the mantle, this framed God-thunder, “Give Thanks.“

It’s no neon sign, more this painting in a quaint Shaker-style. There’s only two remaining Shakers now. I think about that.

Think about whether they’re still giving thanks and if this whole pilgrim thanksgiving thing, this whole holiday she-bang, isn’t a bit of quaint antiquated denial in a world that’s right busted and hemorraghing a mess straight out the side. 

Because on the Tuesday, I sat with a mother who stood over a hole in the earth three weeks ago, and watched as they laid her son in soil and they just buried her baby in dirt and expected her to walk away.

I’m looking this mama in the eye and I want to claw the damp, clammy earth open with my very fingernails and who cares how many days Jesus stayed away from Bethany after Lazarus died — why does He not come here, here, and resurrect our cold joy?

A friend witnesses this fiendish luring and devouring of her child’s innocence and the nightmares jolt her awake in the dead of night and why does the laboring anguish over a child never stop?

And a man tells me that his parents were overseas missionaries when his little sister too died as a child, some seed that lodged in her throat, and he knows what my story’s like, and we weep for everything that feels stolen away. Then he tells me that just this summer his twenty-something sister went missing. And I shake my head no. And he says it like a haunting: then the river gave back parts of her and a trial for the murder will be this June. The daughter of lifetime missionaries? Who have already buried one child?

Who doesn’t watch the news and howl? Who doesn’t breathe through wounds and grieve for what was or dreamed and isn’t? How do you sit around a table and bow your head in thanks when parts of this world and bits of you are somewhere crushed?

And I peel squash and there is God and yada, yada, yada.

And yadah, it’s Hebrew, and it literally means to hold out the hand in four ways:

1. to bemoan with this wringing of hands.

2. or to revere with an extending of hands.

And this too on the page of the Strong’s Concordance:

3. Yadah means to confess.

4. Yadah means to give thanks.

Yadah –   the whisper of Psalms 92:1:

“It is a good thing to [yada] — give thanks – and sing praises to unto thy name, O most High.”

It is a good thing to yada: in the midst of the wringing of hands, to extend the hand.

It is a good thing to yada: hold out the hand — not as a fist to God, but in praise to God.

It is a good thing to yada: give thanks — to brazenly confess that God is wholly good though the world is horribly not.

You hear it — this scoffing yada, yada, yada — as if much and everywhere is banal, this aching meaninglessness that drones on and on.

And in the midst of genocides and suicides, the divorce and disease, the death and dark, we understand the yada all around us,  the holding up of fists at God instead of extending the hand in thanks and we empathize with the unbeliever’s confusion, because it’s our own confusion, and in this struggle to be grateful to God for always and for everything, we pray with humble earnestness for the unbeliever: because before a Good God haven’t we all been been momentary unbelievers?

And yet there it is, and you hear it now, at the cusp of the feasting, the yada, yada, yada, that sings relentless and bold:

We won’t stop confessing He is good and we won’t stop thanking Him for grace and we won’t stop holding out our hands — and taking His hand. We won’t stop believing that “God is good” is not some trite quip for the good days but a radical defiant cry for the terrible days.

That “God is good” is not a stale one-liner when all’s  happy but a saving lifeline when all’s hard.

And we will keep giving thanks, yada, yada, yada, because giving thanks is only this: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.

I’m holding the squash in hand. That’s what the mother had said standing there in her tsunami of grief: “I believe God is good. I believe that is all there really is.”

And every time I give thanks, I confess to the universe the goodness of God. I had touched her hand.

She had said it, her eyes so clear, like you could see straight into her, into all that remains.

The morning fog ebbs across harvested fields.

Thanksgiving in all things accepts the deep mystery of God through everything.

And there will be bowed heads around all the tables.

And there will be lights flickering brave to burn back the black, and there will be a believing in relentless redemption and a reaching out and around of all these hands,  reaching out in this yada, yada, yada, this steady confessing of the goodness of God — come whatever.

And there are leaves fallen frosted across the lawn.

Their confession glinting on and on….

 

 

 

 

 

Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!

1. Grab this month’s Free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2013. Jot them down in the new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating… 3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Only the Good Stuff: Links to Feed the Soul

A young couple’s journey — through love, life and illness.

Tears at these photos.

“Before They Pass Away,” a long-term project by photographer Jimmy Nelson, gives us the unique opportunity to discover more than 30 secluded and slowly vanishing tribes from all over the world.

Spending 2 weeks in each tribe, Jimmy’s mission was to assure that the world never forgets how things used to be: “Most importantly, I wanted to create an ambitious aesthetic photographic document that would stand the test of time. A body of work that would be an irreplaceable ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world.”

All of his snapshots now lie in a massive book and will be extended by a film…

Never too far away and never too late.

There is always hope.

This is worth reading.

Yes, this: for every mother who wishes she had done it better

From a mama who is learning how His grace is more than enough

Fascinating.

The steps of growth and progress of an astonishing young artist.

Truth that will feed your soul for the season!

Fee Printable for the fridge

What. a. story.

WOW – for several reasons here.

Joy all around!

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

Every day is a good day. Just ask Mark Leon – he’s never had a bad one.

A story of deep admiration and love.

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

pssst….big news that one of my crazy beautiful #NoMeasuring sisters and I are really excited to share with you…

maybe the kick start to the holiday season that your soul really needs?

#StayTuned!

And this message on Facebook?

What I prayed for when scratching this book out in the margin hours of dark late this spring:

Looking for a few copies – - gifts?

Lifeway has told us they are offering The Greatest Gift at 40% off!

Powerful story of a rare friendship that you “don’t find twice”.

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

Overwhelmed by how you are making this a movement…

#NoMoreMeasuring Revolution

 

That’s all, this weekend, good friends–

Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.

Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joice.

Share Whatever Is Good. 

 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

How the Hidden Dangers of Comparison are Killing Us … {and Our Daughters} : The Measuring Stick Principle

When our Hope-girl came in and sat at the foot of our bed, I knew she was looking for a way to stand.

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

I gathered her long hair in my hands, gathered her mane all in one long strand and twisted it slow, around and around, as if I could make a rope for a girl to hold on to.

“Hon, there will always be people who see the world in measuring sticks instead of in burning bushes.”

“Huh?” She lets her glasses slide a bit down her nose, archs her eyebrows at me, like she needs some bridge of explanation.

“There will always be people who see everything in the world as a measuring stick of their worthiness, instead of as a burning bush of God’s gloriousness.

If your life looks like a mess – to them — they whip out a measuring stick and feel confident of their own worthiness.

If your life looks like a monument – to them — they whip out a measuring stick – and start cutting for their own empowerment.”

She leans over and I want to gather her close. I rub her back in these slow circles.

“The thing is, Hon?,” I knead out a tight knot in her shoulder, loosening the muscles.

“The world isn’t a forest of measuring sticks. The world is forest of burning bushes. Everything isn’t a marker to make you feel behind or ahead; everything is a flame to make you see GOD is here.

That God is working through this person’s life, that God is redeeming that person’s life, that God is igniting this work, that God is present here in this mess, that God is using even this.”

Hope lays her head on my shoulder.

“Know what, Hon?”

“Walk through life with a measuring stick – and your eyes get so small you never see God.”

She nods. And then whispers: “Why does anybody compare at all? Why do we do it – why do I do it?”

She exhales this sigh like she’s trying to relieves the swelling in her soul.

“Oh girl — ” I want to make this all go away for her. “Remember when you guys were little? And I’d have a couple measuring sticks out when I was piecing together a quilt? What would you guys would do with the measuring sticks?

She says it slow, laying back on the bed. — “Use them as swords?”

Exactly. Measuring sticks always become weapons.

I want to tell her, and every woman browsing through a fashion magazine, standing on a scale, scrolling through Pinterest, clicking through blogs, looking in a mirror: Every yardstick always becomes a billystick.

Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else’s and you’ve just picked up a stick and bashed your own soul.

Measuring sticks always become weapons. Of Self-Harm.

“Know how Dad always tells the boys when they’re building something? Measure twice cut once.

Well, when you’re building a life? Measure yourself once against anyone else – and you cut twice: them and you.”

She nods. Hope nods. And I want to cup her face and every woman who feels less than or more than, every woman who feels judged, every woman who feels like a failure, who feels tired with all the measuring people up that’s tearing her down. To cup her beautiful face and murmur what I know from touching my own scars:

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.

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

And the thing about meausuring sticks, girl? 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. There is no point trying to size people up, no point trying to compare – because souls defy measuring.

You can’t measure souls.

And the moment you try to measure souls — you try to usurp God. And ain’t nobody who needs reminding who tried to usurp God. Measuring people is always devilish work – and carrying around a measuring stick a bit like carrying around a pitchfork.

Hope squeezes my hand tight.

I whisper it to her like a heart’s battle cry, like it could rally a generation of daughters and women and sisters:

Girls rival each other. Women revive each other.

Girls empale each other. Women empower each other.

Girls compare each other. Women champion each other.

And Hope, she smiles and she stands.

She stands.

And when she turns, the way the light catches in her hair, she looks like every woman I’ve ever known –

she looks like a tree ablaze.

 

 

Related:

How Hurting Women Can Help Each Other Heal

The 1 Command that Could Heal The Church, Our Hurting Places, and the Real Sisterhood of Women

{ Hope’s Nest Necklace: By her brother Caleb, offered here}

Photo credit Owen McKnight, Cher Amino

 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

A Whole Forest of Printable Thanksgiving Trees

Your Thanks Giving Trees?

Joining even the trees of the field that will clap their hands in thanks to Him! 

Print out Your Own Thanks Giving Tree?

{We’d love to see your Thanks Giving tree? Share your Thanksgiving Tree with us on twitter? (@annvoskamp #1000gifts) Instagram? (@annvoskamp #1000gifts)  or over in our Gratitude to God Facebook community? }

 

 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Why Thanksgiving is Subversive {and How to Have the Best Thanksgiving Yet}

Mama can kick leaves in the woods like she’s tearing back the crumpled paper wrapped over the surface of things.

She walks with a stick.

She dragged it out from under some maple saplings. And then she pins that trail under her right down.

Like there’s no loud and flippant way she’s letting anything make her miss the now right under her, no way that that now could just up and slip out from under her.

You could be a sophisticated cynic and miss your whole life that way.

You walk a bold, amazed way when you know the destination is here.

What had Mary Oliver defiantly scratched down with an inked stick of her own?

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”

Everyone’s wild to stop feeling overwhelmed – but nobody ever wants everything to stop and be over.

Mama walks like that through the woods. Like she knows it’s going to be over someday, all over. That your face will come tight right up to it and there’s no stick you can fine anywhere to fight time off. Here will be over.

And then there’ll be that stark moment when you turn and see what you were married to. You can live your life as the bride married to Hurry, having affairs with Not Enough, Always Stress, and Easy Cynicism.

Yeah, I guess we all get to choose our own bedfellows.

Mama always said it and she didn’t care what anyone thought of it: God was her husband. And that ain’t just some metaphor to get the Pharisees all in a prudish knot – it’s brazen Scripture. Take it or go ahead and leave it. We all get to choose our own bedfellows – and who we’ll give our soul to, who or what will get our life.

Mama’s standing there, already decided.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement, vowed to Awe Himself, covenanted to Christ –and I took the whole of everything He gave in this gloried world into my open arms with thanks.

Because really? Anybody can be a cynic. Cynicism is laziness in every way.

The real heroes are the ones who never stop looking for the possibility of joy.

“Here is good.” Mama taps the ground of the trail with her stick, holding here down. Here is always good if you look at it long enough.

“Good light.” Mama looks up.

So that’s where Levi and I drag the tables to. Haul in stumps to stand in as legs for plank benches. Throw old quilts down as tablcloths and lay out the plates.

“Are we crazy?” I tug at the end of one of the quilts. Mama raises her one eyebrow — “I mean, not in a general, yes, obviously-we-are-crazy sense — but in a specifically in a trying- to- have- a- Thanksgiving-dinner in- the- woods- sense?”

Mama grins. Winks. Knowingly.

Yeah – she doesn’t have to say it.

Wherever you are – Thanksgiving is always for those crazy enough to see grace for the trees.

 

 

Thanksgiving is always for the audacious and the courageous and Grace is always for the risky.

We lay out the table and string up the banners and it’s all ridiculous enough to be meant to be and anyone who whispers eucharisteo, who dares to give thanks for obscene grace, can come to the table.

It’s like the unlikely feast in the middle of the trees is the upside down and the unexpected that is right.

There is Mama and the kids and the Farmer and cousins and aunts and uncles and a Thanksgiving in the woods, in the coming dark and the cooling light, and this feels subversive and right.

Because the shock of it is:

Grace is never passive. Grace is a hijacker. Grace hijacks the dark, hijacks the looming forests, hijacks the sins. Grace hijacks the impossible, the unlikely, the angry, the cynics, the doomed.

Your calling is radical: gloriously hijack every darkness with grace.

To love mercy and do justice and follow Christ means to be the Revolutionary Guerillas of Grace — radically turning the fallen world Upside Down.

And if grace is a hijacker of the dark — then it makes sense to give thanks in the most unlikely places. 

Mama serves up pumpkin pie under a beech tree. Men eat the last of the turkey under the ancient limbs of oaks. I look at them all and I love them for this.

 

There are always the quiet revolutionaries who give thanks for grace in the unexpected.

There are always the real revolutionaries who know this overthrows all the pressing dark.

There are, even now, the revolutionaries who know salvation is no cheap gift; they know what they were saved for. They choose to give glory with the breaths given. They choose to be married to amazement because only amazing grace divorces souls from the dark.

The kids are lit in the last light, like their hair has been caught on glory. The way they laugh and it rises and nothing can hold it down. Mama walking through the leaves sounds like the rustling open, the unwrapping of gifts.

I can’t take my eyes off those three with their backs pressed up against the bark of a Tree.

The way grace hijacks the shadows.

 

 

 

 

Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts? Dare you to Joy! Take the dare to Fully Live!

1. Grab this month’s Free JOY DARE Calendar with 3 daily prompts to go on a scavenger hunt for God’ gifts … {or write down any gifts you choose. Use the free app.} 2. Count 3 gifts a day and you have over #1000gifts in 2013. Jot them down in the new numbered One Thousand Gifts devotional journal — The Farmer’s writing in his with a red pen and daily – the numbers in the journal already there! Motivating… 3. Share your gifts everyday in our beautiful Facebook community to enter everyday for the monthly $100 Amazon draw (or link to your blog post with your list of gifts). 4. Count #1000gifts in 2013 and enter to win a Nikon DSLR camera with lens. Slow Down. Savor Life. Give thanks. Believing something is one thing. But the Best only comes when you decide to Be Living it. Please, jump in, make your life about giving thanks to God! — Just add the direct URL to your specific 1000 gift list post… and if you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other in our refrain of thanks by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Give thanks to the Lord! His Love Endures Forever!

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Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Only The Good & Pure Stuff: Links to Share the Encouraging

What began as a simple row of tractors as a tribute to a young farmer….

Dare you to no tears at this story?

Love to read books?

Just a bit of crazy inspiration for every bookworm out there.

This professional football player and his wife — and how their brokenness…. led to wholeness.

Might this be the world’s most romantic proposal?

Filling a father’s final days with joy…

We can do this for each other…

{Consider turning off music by clicking the speaker bar near the bottom of  the left margin?}

This little girl? No. Words. Only praise to her Maker….

Just. love. this. unbelievable. story.

Luke 18:16: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

Let’s come into His presence and count the ways He loves us!

Free Printable for the Fridge

A New Perspective For Moms -

Just – wow. Every. parent. must. see. this.

That’s all, this weekend, good friends–

Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth.

Give Thanks. Love well. Re – joice.

Share Whatever Is Good. 

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

Why November is Statistically the Hardest Month — and how to beat it:

So according to the guys in lab coats with thick glasses –

 they say November is the month of the year that depression is most likely to spike.

Most likely to spike and prick hard and deflate everything unexpectedly.

About the middle of the month, they say — right before Thanksgiving.

Clouds can press low in November, the dark underbelly of things pressing to close.

And the guys in lab coats, they also say this:

That if you write down 5 things a day you are grateful for? Your happiness set point rises like a flame in the dark:

you feel 25% happier.   Like a pushing back of the dark.

“People who were in the gratitude condition felt fully 25% happier – they were more optimistic about the future, they felt better about their lives — and they even did almost 1.5 hours more exercise a week than those in the hassles or events condition.”

How we behold determines if we hold joy. Behold glory and be held by God.

How we look determines how we live … IF we live.

The strange quiet paradox of this — our lives change when we receive life with thanks  – and ask for nothing to change.

Let the rain fall in November.  Let the clouds scuttle west. Let the kettles whistle of better things.

And let the thanks rise.

 

 {maybe print out your own Thanks Giving Tree –

a simple little way to quietly celebrate November?}

{ at 50% off at Christian Book – maybe quietly tuck away a few for gift giving? 

– a soul-nourishing read to curl up with in this season of thanks and gifts? }

Scavenger Hunt for God’s glory. Count  1000 ways He loves you – count  1000 gifts.

Scientific reasearch says that giving thanks for just 3 things a day makes you 25% happier.

God’s Word says give thanks in everything because He knows this is how we live through everything.

Scavenger hunt through November for His gifts so you don’t miss Him.

( and enter to win a NikonD90 camera & a $100 Amazon Gift Card?)

How to Count Gifts?

~ Print out November’s Joy Dare {or the whole year (thus far) of Joy Dares}  – put on your fridge, have it at the dinner table, over the kitchen sink. Have a family scavenger hunt for His gifts everyday 00  and enter to win a Nikon D90 camera

~ Check out the free #1000gifts App … for iPhone or iPad… the new (free) #1000gifts app is like your own mobile gratitude journal to snap photos and record notes of your gifts from the Giver. So many so loving it.And more fun things to come. Free! Happy August!

~ Blog your 1000 gifts, or tag #1000 gifts on Instagram, or join us on Mondays and link up to the list on your blog, or record a legacy of your 1000 gifts in the new numbered journal–

And, if you’d like to be entered into the monthly draw for a JOY BASKET  (including a $100 Amazon gift card), share your gifts everyday in the Facebook Gratitude community (everyday we post 3 prompts of what gifts you could look for #JOYDARE!) ... and come the end of the year and counting 1000 gifts (after recording only 3 gifts a day/1000 gifts) … be back here to enter for a Nikon D90 camera…  Give thanks to Him in the assembly…

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}

The Number 1 Way to Really Find Your Real Self

… as this #31Days series, Missing Him, draws to a close — something a bit different, just for today, to put us in a vertical space with Him.

There’s this prayer to Him….there is just the beginning:

Wherever I am, I’ll be all here,

because You are I AM .

You fill the present moment with Your grace, the only air not toxic to breathe.

You fill the present moment with Your presence, the only gift I ever need,

so why rush through all the moments of now?

Why flee You in the now for the future ahead where worry lives,

fear’s always the flee ahead.

Why reject You in the now for the past where regret leaves me for dead,

hope’s always You ahead.

Your presence is always in the now

I am with You now — where I AM always is…

Now is the destination.

Today, I will rest in the present moment with I AM

because this is where I find the rest of myself.

I am loved … chosen by Christ

I am known … named by Christ

I am fearless … safe in Christ

I am brave … always with Christ.

I am done missing you, God —

When I miss You, God,

I miss me.

 

Celebrating our #31Days Missing Him series with this:

Why Staying in the Present Moment Matters — I AM … I AM is always here.

Miss God — and you miss your real identity, your real self…

 

 

“Ann Voskamp on Christmas –
is like Monet on sunsets…
meant for each other.”
~Max Lucado
@ Amazon: a top 10 bestseller

This is the last post in a #31Days series: Find the entire series here.

Missing Him:– and not missing what can’t be missed.

Don’t want to Miss Him this year? Don’t want to miss Him this Christmas? 

Long to be changed — by the new year, for the new year?

Consider my newest book, The Greatest Gift – 

a fresh unwrapping of The Love Story — your love story — the one you’ve been missing … and don’t want to miss anymore.

If you’ve experienced more of Jesus in this 31 day series, Missing Him — The Greatest Gift  is your invitation to come closer. We are called to do more than believe in Jesus — we are called to live in Jesus. This book takes you there during the sacred season of Christmas. 

One startlingly fresh reading for every day of December — that will usher you into His heart quite unlike anything you’ve experienced before. 

He’s been missing you.

(psst… Stay Tuned — big news coming about  The Greatest Gift and how YOU are being invited to the farm! )

Click here to download the FREE EASTER / LENT Devotional: The Trail to the Tree{please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}