Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 279
November 19, 2012
Links for 2012-11-18 [del.icio.us]
@ NYTimes... "Schedule time for decluttering — say, an hour each day on most days, until you’re done."
Pray for these "50 Women Most Shaping Church and Culture"?
@Christianity Today... God's got these women hard on my heart today... that each keep listening to God's call on their lives as they follow Him in ministries beyond themselves. That they keep help more of the rejected & forgotten sing the "song of the women" for His glory. Will you pray with me for these "50 Women to Watch"?
A Give Away
...that might just be a gift of everyday grace?
November 18, 2012
Links for 2012-11-17 [del.icio.us]
... perfect for this coming week --- or to give as a gift for the kids? A friend who needs a bit of joy?
November 17, 2012
6 Wondrous Links for your Thanksgiving Week
A Thanksgiving Psalm:
Psalm 100 {The Message}
OOn your feet now — applaud God!
Bring a gift of laughter,
sing yourselves into his presence.
Know this: God is God, and God, God.
He made us; we didn’t make him.
We’re His people, His well-tended sheep.
Enter with the password: “Thank you!”
Make yourselves at home, talking praise.
Thank him. Worship him.
For God is sheer beauty,
all-generous in love,
loyal always and ever.
6 Links to Make it a Great Thanksgiving Week
1. Free Printable Family Trivia booklets for any big gathering : get everyone laughing and reminiscing around the table!
2. Immediate Elegance for any thanksgiving table (or any meal?): Free Printables of place cards, food tent cards, food labels/candy labels, straw/cupcake flags, and thank you tags — just. beautiful.
3. Bless Someone with this: the Neighbours or the mailperson or the teller at the checkout this week with this gorgeous free printable and any wee treat at all! Perfect week to be the gift to someone that may give thanks to God! Love this one!
4. Free Gratitude Journal for the Kids this week – or as a free gift for a friend who needs a bit of joy this week?
5. { doing this amazing little activity together — as a family, or class, or church?}
6. { And the perfect devotionals to carry you peacefully all through this holiday season – arriving just in time to help really celebrate Thanksgiving: #1 Best Seller in Christian Devotionals }
Go slow. Be God-struck. Grant grace. Live Truth. Give Thanks. Become the gift.
May the grace and truth of our Father surprise you all over again this weekend, friends!
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-11-16 [del.icio.us]
@ BBC... "I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor." Simply, you have to read this. And slowly.... again.
November 16, 2012
How to Not Miss Your Real Life Calling
When they cut the three right open and start pulling out the inner guts, there isn’t a sound in the room.
They’re focused and silent and pulling at strings and ripping away at things and I wonder if I am doing any of this ridiculous thing right?
Not the pumpkins — I could care less how we hack these three up. It’s the kids, this year, my life.
I keep losing the keys and time and bits of my stringy mind and it’s hard to keep company with Jesus when you are losing your sanctification over piles of shoe rubble heaped at the back door.
Unanswered letters haunt at the desk. I don’t sew. Or can, or found charities, or take the Gospel into the the mosquito-humming depths of the jungle. I lose to the laundry. Scrape burnt soup from the bottom of the pressure cooker I let hiss like an angry mistake far too long.
Holler at kids and beg forgiveness and lay in bed awake facing all the things I’d said I’d never become.
Am I making any of the right decisions?
I’ve never been here before — so how do I know the way?
Does a middle class life in North America add up to more than a hill of beans? Do you get on planes to bless the materially blessed with more of the Words of God and call it the great commission? Or do you stay at home and sort the socks from the underwear and pray for revival and give to missions month and train them up in the godly way they should go and referee mindless bickering while begging God to somehow multiply your life into more than a few flailing, gasping fish. You’ve only got one life.
Shalom’s pulling pumpkin entrails right out.
She has this one tendril curling around the frame of her face. I can see the scar of that fan blade on Levi’s one finger as he scoops out the pulp. The clock’s ticking loud.
You’ve only got one blink of a life to make count for eternity.
Have I read enough chapters out loud to them all piled close or read too many facebook status updates from people I didn’t even really know twenty years ago? Have I laughed at enough abnoxious knock-knock jokes or been too busy walking through doors to somewhere else? Or have I played enough rousing games of monopoly, tickled into the dark, listened with every chamber of my selfish heart? Will Levi and his brothers someday be standing in ties to give eulogies that I was a mother who plucked straight out of the pulsing best of her to make them into balding, blessed men?
It’s only your own sacrifices that show up at your funeral.
Am I making any of the right ones?
When are your sacrifices really just about lining your own nest? What road, what career, what part of the world and is it okay to stay here or is it okay to go and is that even the right question? Do you have to choose between mothering and mission or can you choose both and what does that really look like at 11:30 on a Friday morning in Kansas?
Will I someday be standing with scars to give account before Him that I wasn’t about my own comfort but Christ’s call, that I didn’t make my life about safe living but about dangerous dying, that I didn’t escape into a neat, saved American dream but into a messy, mission-driven God-sized demand.
Malakai’s digging hard up through the center and innards slip to the floor.
I lean over, scoop up the tangled mess, finger one of the wet seeds. It’s so smooth. So ready.
What am I doing with my one wild life?
Am I making any of the right decisions?
And I remember 10 years ago and a Sunday morning and it echoes in my head in this quiet room of kids and pumpkins and this pulpy warm cry from deep inside.
Levi wasn’t six months old.
Our little country Bible Chapel wasn’t 10 minutes from the farm, just over the country line. Corn fields to the south of the chapel. A maple woods just behind the chapel to the west, behind the gravel yard where all the farmers park their pickups. And on the far side of the chapel, just to the north — Leary’s pond.
Hot dog roasts at the pond. Canoes and paddleboats on the pond. Summer baptisms in the pond. But no one really wanted to lose a wonderful kid – or really, any kid– in the pond after Sunday services.
And Hope, she was just 3 and she was scared of that pond after Sunday services. And the maple woods. The girl wanted a fence and rules and where she should go — but there was no fence that marked the lines of this space here and this way there.
The kid got it early. Fences and rules are easier — this is the best life and that is the less life, this is the way and that is a copout, this family is on fire for the Kingdom and this family is just going to crash and burn.
But the Farmer, he scooped up his little girl and said it in his gentle spoken way — “I’ll stand outside after the service and I’ll be keep a close eye for you. But listen.” He’d cupped Hope’s full cheeks in his field worn hands. “Your Dad will call you– and if you can’t hear him? You’re not where you are meant to be.“
Your Father calls you.
And if you can’t hear Him?
Am I making the right decisions?
“Do you think this is good enough?” Levi shows me the inners of his pumpkin and I’m looking in his eyes, right into his eyes.
We want clarity — and God gives a call. We want a road map — and God gives a relationship. We want answers — and God gives His hand.
The whole room, it’s still quiet and holy full and God singularly calls you and a call from God is about relationship and a call is something one keeps listening for — come this way, come to the land I will show you. God didn’t give Abraham a map — He gave Abraham a relationship. He doesn’t want you to lean on a guidebook. God wants you to lean on the Guide — who speaks to you through His Book. Why would God give a map — when He wants to give you Himself?
We need the person of God more than we need the plan for our life.
“Mom?”
Shalom looks up and I hear her and I hear Him and a calling is something you never stop listening for. And I help Shalom scoop out the very last and I’ve come to the skin of it and I know the way through for me… And career – career, it comes from the French word — carriere — meaning road or a highway, and a career is about well marked roads and clear fences and mapping out your life, following the chart, focused on these goals.
A career is about the guidebook and a calling is about leaning on the Guide who speaks to you through His Book. A career is about making a plan and a calling is about trusting a Person who changes the plan. Grace, that careers can fall way to callings.
The call that thing one keeps listening for and the heart of faith is the ear.
And after the innards have all been spooned and the pumpkin pureed and the stories read and the kids put to bed, I find the pillow and lay the ear up against His Word and I read it and I hear Him:
This is the way for you — not her way, not their way — but My Way for You.
And in the stillness, the Father’s voice calls and there is a moving back closer to hear Him —
The sound of peace and what you were meant to be filling all the room.
So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be … “
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-11-15 [del.icio.us]
...speaks my life. Mama of 5, teaching her kids, artist for Christ. Click on play... Excited for what is God has next here -- soul beautiful.
The Best Christmas Present Ever
@Balancing Beauty and Bedlam .... really. Gather the kids to read this!
November 15, 2012
The Song for all the Women
When the gorgeous woman on stage with the microphone and the songs hikes up the side of her shirt to show all 10,000 of us how her white side spills thick over the elasticized waist of her pants —
I want to know what Jesus thinks of women.
“I’ve been rejected all of my life because of my size.” The singer holds her milk white thigh right there and she’s vulnerable thin to the front row and to those at the back of Section K and I look down at my feet.
She’s standing on a stage and she’s holding out her bare roll of skin, a bearing of soul, holding out her cellulite and begging us to look in her eyes and why am I looking away?
And there are 10,000 women sitting under this domed roof holding out their hearts like empty cups.
They’re here right next to me — all these women rejected for the size of their pants, the size of their house, the size of their family, the size of their work.
Women brushed off because they live too large or they live too small, because there is more of them than people know what to do with, because they can’t or don’t or won’t fit into someone else’s box.
Women who can’t make their faith just fit thin into their heads and these skinny lines of dry bullet points, but let their God-life roll over into their outed closets and messy stories, women who don’t only fit into these categories — mommy blogger, size small, housewife, single career woman, mother, retiree — because they are women made in the image of God and they are more than only this.
I look around at a whole convention center of women, scarred and banged up and brave and still standing, and the singer is standing there a bit bare and all I can hear is their song.
All I can hear is the whole uncontainable song of the women and I see how their lives break the refrain and the whole place reverberates with a truth that rolls over, rolls like thunder.
Our God is the God of Hagar and Ours is the God who sees and for the women forgotten and for the women unwanted and the women left behind, there is water in the wilderness and He is our well and all is well.
Ours is the Savior who told women stories and this was serious theology, stories messy and large and in full color life, about a woman with a broom and He says she is the hero who lives good doctrine, the woman in her house seeking and finding the certain kingdom of God.
Ours is the Savior who sings of us, of the woman who won’t walk away from the unjust judge, from the call, from the plea, the women who never give up, who just keep on keeping on, and He says she is honored and His, the woman who just keeps going and giving and believing in grace.
And God Incarnate, Son of Man in the flesh, He makes one of His daughters the cameo of real theology and right praxis, a sister, this woman, this widow, who walks into the temple, and gives the very smallest of coins, 1/5th of a penny, and God Incarnate praises the woman who did what she could in the small and the sacrificed, and He said it was everything and He deems it large and this is who we are.
We are the women who want the thing God wants more than we are afraid of it, the women who know when the love of Christ motivates, the more fearless of everything we become, the women who know real joy is not found in having the best of everything but in trusting that God’s making the best of everything.
We are the women who make our lives about the cause of Christ, not the applause of men, live to express the Gospel, not to impress the Jones’, live not to make our absence felt, but to make Christ’s presence known.
We are the women who know it’s not about us and all about Glory.
We are the women who unloose the hair, the women who do the lavish unlikely, the women who bow at the bare feet of God and touch pure holiness and we are rent by grace and we break and we fit and we spill with this shocking love.
“I’ve been rejected for my size — but Jesus takes all of me.” The singer on the stage, she says this, her eyes welling, her skin bare right there in her hands.
Then she raises her hands and she sings.
{Beg your grace for being out of step here all week. Lord willing, the rest of this week as normal & link ups back next Monday [ with a link up for #1000gift posts] & next Wednesday [with a Walk with Him link up on "The Practice of the Gospel."] Keep singing, sisters!}
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-11-14 [del.icio.us]
I've read it three times. What this says --- there couldn't be a better post for American Thanksgiving.
Love Moves
@Angie Smith ... the most powerful 4 minutes on the internet today. Do not pass Go, do not collect anything -- but just. read. this. post. Unforgettable.
The Story of the Cancer Sweater
... Believing that Christ alone wraps us in Himself. What if we did this for people we love?
November 14, 2012
Links for 2012-11-13 [del.icio.us]
Whatever you are doing -- start. here. Because what's coming? Begins here. Amen.
Have a LIFE statement?
@HolleyGerth ... a mission statement? The important never seems urgent --- take just a few moments to check out how to get to your life statement really fast...
when our love doesn't seem like enough...
@ Kisses from Katie... "And in the mean time I just ask it, I beg it, that we would be people who cannot stop worshiping the Lamb who is worthy." Amen.
{Pssst... Half Price?}
...our friends @Family Christian have let us know that they are offering One Thousand Gifts for 50% off -- only $8.69 for a jacketed hardcover... Might make a lovely, encouraging gift for someone you love this season? (And Under "Free Tools" here on the blog find the printables for a card and your own Joy in a Basket for a a gift package?) Know someone who needs some joy?
November 13, 2012
What We All Need to Really Breathe
Six times my mama lies in ER this past week, waiting news.
Good doctors can have degrees and no answers.
My sister gives up long days and advocates on knees and in waiting rooms and Mama and her, they sing hymns and drown out clocks and fears.
I rub Mama’s feet during the short nights and the late watches.
I massage the bare weary arch of her feet and I tell her that I love her. I tell her that hair looks lovely wound high and falling. I tell her that she is never alone and her hand feels like thin white silk in mine and some dog to the south barks in the night. Mama touches my cheek.
She murmurs it. “Thank you. Thank you for coming.” I tell her she’s laid her life down a thousand times. She shakes her head, glasses slipping further down her nose, another tendril falling. Sacrifice stuns in all its costly loveliness, all it’s love. The glow of the bedside lamp washes the wall behind her and our shadows stretch long on the white.
This is the gospel of grace. Grace laid it’s arm down a beam and grace never stops reaching out, reaching for you, reaching straight across walls and through fences and over barbed wire laws. Grace in the going and the giving and this is the how you accept the Gospel.
The gospel isn’t only what we accept; the Gospel is also what we extend.
The Gospel good news that has God let a vein, it gets in our veins and He gets in our heart, that new, fleshy warm heart pulsating grace and the Gospel isn’t just what we accept on paper, it’s what we live in person. The Gospel is the Good News that is so good isn’t just for the brain but for the Body – we live the Gospel.
That heart of flesh now pumps in us and animates us and we only rise because of the Gospel — that astonishing news that grace grabbed the unworthy and Christ cleans the unbearable and God redeems the unlikely and we live the unexpected.
The grace we’ve received from the heart of God is the grace that extends our arms to the world.
And two of the cowlicked sons, they rant bombastic ugly at each other over an unmade bed and a mess of electrical doodad parts.
And it isn’t even 9 in the morning and they don’t get the hair or the temper off anyone strange.
The Farmer says it quiet to sons, that all this hollering, it’s no gospel, and I’m the railing mother whose sin reeks, who needs Christ’s nailing and more than a tidy bit of grace and how do I keep falling hard everyday and tripping all these kids too?
How can a mother do so much everyday and know she does so much wrong? Sometimes holding a kid is this wild prayer for God to just hold it all together.
And when the Farmer softly asks sons, “Who can extend grace and live Gospel?” I turn to our boys and look in eyes and I see me and them and the ache of us and what had Spurgeon had said:
“I do not admire the term ‘progressive sanctification’, for it is unwarranted by Scripture.
But it is certain that the Christian does grow in grace.
And though his conflict may be as severe in the last day of his life as in the first moment of conversion, yet he does advance in grace —
and all his imperfections and his conflicts within cannot prove that he has not made progress.”
Christianity isn’t about growing good — it’s about growing grace-filled. The grace we’ve received from the heart of God is the grace that extends our arms to the world.
Why in the world did I keep telling the boys to be more Christ-like as if He was a ladder to ascend, to progressively strive to be more sanctified — when being Christ-like is about being grace-filled, not about ladders but about laying down and reaching wide?
Christianity isn’t about growing good, it’s about growing grace-filled — Christ-like.
Mama that night — The true beauty of advancing in years is the truth of advancing in grace.
And I sit on the edge of a knotted up bed with boys and a tangled life and the boys have to know what I’m just repenting of: “The Gospel isn’t basic — it’s what all believers breathe.“
Why did I ever think the Gospel was only elementary and not all encompassing?
This is the Gospel that I don’t just need, but need to live and preach — and to me. Like a rubbing of the hurting places, a drowning out of fears.
This preaching gospel to yourself daily isn’t cliche — it’s critical. Otherwise it’s your very life that’s in critical condition.
When you fail and you bleed fallen and you’re the mess just wild to somehow make it, it’s inhaling the Gospel that heals: Blessed assurance, Jesus assures: You don’t have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps — you only have to pull close.
It’s the gospel in shorthand and pure relief: My hope isn’t built on my performance but on Jesus’ righteousness.
The flesh is always performance driven and everyday I need to become Cross-centered again and no one needs the Gospel only once because all the bad days need the Good News of His grace again and again.
And I love it. I love Jesus and my mama and these boys and I love this good, cosmic-shattering news and I love the way I now get to love and I love a grace that is truth and continually saves and a God whose love won’t let go and I never get over the Gospel: I always need to get more of the Gospel. I touch a boy’s hand, us red-handed sinners. The Gospel isn’t a one time message for the unbeliever but the constant miracle for the imperfect.
Evangelize yourself everyday.
So when the whole crew of them come banging in from the barn at the beginning of the week, I just tell them all outright because I’ve doubted too much, but not this.
That the answering machine has the very best message ever, like the whole angelic realm has descended in full choral glory right here and the limbs of all the trees bear burn marks.
The boys dive for the machine. The Farmer grins, eyebrows raised. I laugh through the house, arms raised in a hailing of holies, like wonder can get in your bones like belief.
“You have ONE new message.” The machine grinds out this indifferent digital monotone. Kai and Levi hunch over the black box, ears turned, eyes waiting round.
And I stand in the kitchen before a sink erupting encrusted pots and pans and prayers and I flagrantly challenge the machine’s automated apathy: “And it’s the Best. Message. Ever.” There’s a message that cleans up every mess. Mine.
And there it is, all static but all amazed: “Helloooo?”
This little lisp voice echoes on the recording. Levi half chuckles.
Kai lights — “Oh, it’s… !”
“SSShhhh.” Levi elbows him quiet. Shalom pushes in between brothers and the Farmer stands with the fridge door open like a beckoning in –
“This is Tia*…” How can that dimpled niece already be 5?
The whole house leans and waits and — the news finally comes like a cure.
“This is Tia — and I accepted Jesus into my heart last night… (and here is where I can just see her Eloise Wilkin eyes twinkle wide and redeemed….) Goodbye!”
And the angels crescendo and the trump full resounds and the Farmer laughs mercy with a pitcher of orange juice and joy straight descends and the Gospel isn’t just the hope of the unsaved — the Gospel is the very heart of the already saved.
The Gospel isn’t only what we believe in — because the Gospel is ultimately what we. live. out.
And I stand in the kitchen and boys tussle and angels celebrate and Mama somewhere sings and one little girl beats with God.
Jesus our pulse, one thrumming, beating moment after another.
{photo of Mama at hospital singing hymns taken by my gracious sister.
And thank you for grace for a day of stillness yesterday. Please feel free to join us in giving thanks over here.}
Click here to download the FREE JESSE TREE Advent Family Devotional {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Ann Voskamp's Blog
- Ann Voskamp's profile
- 1369 followers
