Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 294
July 26, 2012
July 25, 2012
When All Hope Feels Like a Drought
Aman can watch the sky like a plea.
“And we didn’t get nothing — not one drop.”
That’s what the farmer’s wife said to me before breakfast.
How she headed home from town in a flat-out gully washer of a rain, thinking this was finally it — the whole dark sky like the ocean coming to find dry land, and she was just certain of it, the rain splatting across her windshield like a certain promise coming right now.
All the corn fields to the north and the south, they’ve been standing twisted right up for weeks.
Leaves curled tight and high in drought. Farmers, we call it pineappling — when corn leaves don’t hang relaxed, quenched and green and soaking in sun — but they writhe up like sharp pineapple spears — taut and parched and desperate to escape anymore heat.
It’s like the whole countryside’s reaching up like a begging.
But she said when she turned the bend, right there at the county line, not a mile and a half from the home farm, all that rain, all that hope, just evaporated into thin, clear air.
How there was nothing.
“When I turned up our lane, there was dust in the rearview mirror and rain coming down hard to the west.”
Hope, it can feel like a balloon string dangling over your head that you just can’t reach.
She shakes her head.
“I don’t think we’re going to make crop.”
That’d be like taking all of last year’s wage and investing it into a project — then putting in 12 hours a day everyday for six months, counting on it, and — and being told that you’ve just lost all of last year’s income — and you won’t be getting paid for this past six months either. That you’ll just have to go home with nothing — to a lot less — because the sky hanging right over your head, sky skirting with abundance just a mile to your north and a half mile to your south — it didn’t open up right overhead and let down your only lifeline.
Farmers in these parts are talking in days. How many days they’ve gone without rain. How many days left until their crop is futile in the field.
“We talked to a farmer who took his thousand acres and cut it down for silage — because when they peeled back the husks? None of the cobs — on a thousand acres — had even a kernel.”
Behind all the husks, there are a thousand ways that a life can feel barren.
Behind all the husks, there are a thousand ways there can seem not to be a kernel of hope at all.
The Farmer had emailed me while I was standing in a lobby in Port Au Prince, Haiti, in between blackouts, in between losing power in a country waiting for a gully-washer of hope. It had blinked up on the screen just before the dark: “We’ve never had a corn crop look so bad.”
And yet — hope is standing in the dark with a lamp lit with prayers.
The lights came back on.
I turn to the Farmer’s wife and I tell her what I had tapped back the Farmer: “So we pray.”
And the Farmer’s wife, she looks over at me and she says it in this sharp desperation of her own —
“You really think it works like that?”
Oh.
My silence, my interior groping — it must betray my confusion. She says it louder.
“You really think it makes any difference, anything you pray? It’s just going to be what it’s going to be.” She turns away.
“It’s just going to be what it’s going to be.”
She says it like she’s watching hope in the rear view mirror, hope headed away heavy for someone else.
And I know that feeling, that witnessing. When I got home at 2:30 am on Sunday morning from Haiti, when after the sermon, I stood on the lawn with the Farmer, my sister and her husband and all our 11 kids, and we watched the sky grow heavy to the west and I begged “Oh, please, Lord…. please.”
And I’m another’s farmer’s wife too and how can I find it for myself and my prayer sounds more like a panic than a peace and I am the biggest mess of them all.
The Farmer’s got his hands in his jean pockets. He’s standing there where the lawn gives way to the corn field.
“I think we’re just on the south edge of this one. And it’s headed just a bit north of us…” He pulls a big Dutch hand out of his pocket, points towards the elevator bins across the fields. ” — See how it’s raining there on the other side of the highway?”
And I feel wild…
What if we get nothing? What if it is the way it is?
And he turns into all my angst storm and he can read me. He looks me in the eye and says it like a forecast:
“When you know your Father’s loving — what can you fear losing?”
He’s as calm as a man walking on water.
“He hears us. He loves us. He has us. So whatever happens, He’s good and we’re good.”
I look at him — He’s like a man completely resting on water. Isn’t that it? We pray to the Lord knowing His answer is Love.
And God is no genie and we don’t pray to God to pry something from God. We pray to God to be prepared by God for a purpose of God.
We don’t pray to get more from God — we pray to become more in Christ.
We pray because entering His presence is the answer to all our prayers.
Somedays just laying our head in His hands is the way we lay the burdens down.
The scars on His hands were made to be the perfect ditches for our tears.
The Farmer pulls me into him and wraps me in more faith and we stand together watching the sky, how the rain goes north.
How it comes down right here like a certain promise:
When your prayers look right into the face of Christ — every hopeless end turns into an endless hope.
:
:
:Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-07-24 [del.icio.us]
"Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third."
Almost Amish
"Along the way, I discovered some Amish principles that we can all try to emulate. These principles provide guidelines for a simpler, slower, more sustainable life. They offer me hope." This.
July 24, 2012
How to Make Any Relationship Better
When the Farmer comes in after 11 from the field, he carries it in on his grimy shirt, a few pounds of dirt.
I wonder if he feels it, the weight of the gritty world on his shoulders.
He finds me in a straight back chair at the window in lamp light. There are pages on my lap. He has no words.
Before I can find mine, before I can say anything, he kneels on the floor.
He takes my feet in his hands.
Without a word, he kneads in these slow circles.
Slow circles across the bottom of my foot, pressing away the day with his hand, pressing back what hurts with his earth-lined field hands.
I want to ask him about wheat and moisture and straw, about the corn in the bin and weather forecasts and if there’s rain coming across the lakes.
I want to confess sins — that I yelled at a kid this morning and it doesn’t matter now what for. That a son needed a ride into town and I sighed too loud and said not today. That I didn’t read aloud tonight and a little girl went to bed sad. I know he can feel it, without need of words, my regrets knotted right deep into me. His grace is tender, loosening… freeing.
I want to look him in the eye and say what I’m finding, all these days, in this slow circuitous way:
Everyone is always saying only one thing: I just want you to love me.
But this is what I do: I get caught up in tone and semantics, when I could just catch hearts.
I watch how he holds mine.
His thumb massages around, around, across the ball of my foot, and it’s always about that — feeling behind the words for the message.
I say nothing.
He says nothing.
We sit in a dark house, in the ring of one light, my foot cupped in his hands. How can the unlovable bear to be loved?
He looks up, smiles.
I close my eyes, hardly bearing.
But this is what love does. Love bears all things: stego in the Greek — it literally means a thatch roof.
Love is a roof that absorbs the storms.
Love bears all things – like a roof bears the wind and the rain. Love willingly carries one another’s burdens – like a roof bears the burden of the snow and the beating sun.
In the downpour of hormones and teenage years and uncertainty — how does mother love bear the weight of the storm; how does she house the child in warmth?
In the drench of learning struggles and bedtime angst and childhood fears — how does mother love bear a child’s burden, listen and learn and look for ways to protect from the rain?
In the hurricane of his working world — how does a wife love her husband like a covering, saturated with the deluge, heavy with prayers?
They just need me to love them.
Love bares nothing and love bears all things — and love carries burdens that sets us all free.
Love bends and enfolds itself around another like a roof. This is love.
I long to let them all in. Why not let them all in?
I brave looking down at him.
He’s still looking up.
Large hands cupping heels, he’s massaging slow and around, protecting, pressing it all back, a safe shelter in hands.
“You must be so tired.” I hardly whisper it, not wanting to be more of a burden for him, wanting to draw my feet away — not wanting to withdraw from him.
“No…” He smiles… “Not tired… not now.”
The moment of the bearing another is like that –
All Weightless…
“No::
::
::
Bear one another’s burdens … … Gal. 6:2
Love bears all things … … 1 Cor. 13:7
::
::
a repost
Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-07-23 [del.icio.us]
... Only. God.
Ten ways to use your creativity for good
@Simple Mom... "We can use our creative minds purposefully to focus on using less resources and blessing others." Inspiring, encouraging, practical post!
July 23, 2012
A Letter For All the World’s Daughters
I wouldn’t have gone to the gold fields if it wasn’t for you.
If you hadn’t handed me Advil for my fever and sore throat, a glass of water for the Advil, a promise that it’d only be 10 minutes and I’d be sorry if I didn’t go to the fields.
We brought the food you’d made for the men.
One plate for your Dad in the combine and one plate for your little brother in the tractor, and you carry those dishes across the fields like a hymn to behold. The wind is all this hot smoldering.
How do you take the hard moments and dig for pure gold?
How does Aurora go from meaning a morning dawn to the city where a dark night rose and women and children and sacrificing men all fell?
How do you let one daughter keep walking out into a world where what glimmers in the black is all this wild-eyed disbelief — that one detonating moment can be minefield trying to sheer peace right off at the knees. How do you explain that living on your knees is best?
How do I come home from Haiti with its tattered mothers feeding babies water until they starve to death in the sun? How do I just arrange all the books by subjects on the shelves and place a vase of Queen Anne’s lace on the sill and make another bowl full of summer salad and watch the wagons go out to the gold yielding fields?
How do I love the daughter who came from somewhere inside of me, how do I love her into the fullness of a cross-shaped woman? And not shirk back when women are stolen in back seats and trafficked in side streets and debated in the church and objectified in the media and cut down by words and weapons and worry? It hasn’t rained here in weeks but I have wept.
Your hair blows across your face like a veil, daughter, and you never stop tucking it back, this brave revealing and still standing.
I see you.
How your mother has to learn to love you better.
I have to whisper to you — that all the other stories of how the world began has these warring gods and big bangs, but that is only the world right now.
In the beginning, our God spoke beauty because He is Beauty and the God of the Bible is an artist and what you must never forget is that you are His art. Touch your face right now and feel what you really are, what His Son whispers, “My masterpiece worth dying for, my beauty worth redeeming.”
I am sorry for all the ways I have ever made you feel less than what His love proves you are worth.
Did you know that your laugh has always sounded like a waterfall of grace to me?
I have to tell you that that He paints you pure loveliness in Christ, that He made you for here and now, to be a gift to the world, to the broken and needy and little and least, right today, right where you are, and there’s no other way to see anything.
Did I ever tell you that Terry Eagleton, a literary critic, critiqued the atheist Richard Dawkins with just this one deft stroke,
“The difference between science and theology is whether you see the world as a gift or not. “
Did I ever tell you that the only difference between a good day and a bad day is whether you see everything as a gift or not?
Did I ever tell you that hell is all about not embracing the Gift — and when we don’t embrace the gift that is in every moment, we invite the anguish to begin right now?
Did you know what one of the young women cut down by a bullet in Aurora, had only weeks prior just missed a bullet by another gunman? (Yes, though the world is that fallen splayed and ugly, He is always beautiful and you do have a choice to hold on to that — to Him.)
And her last entry in her journal, just after dodging that one bullet and just before her heart took the next ripping evil, she wrote what she realized in the face of death, what it all comes down to in the very end:
“Every moment we have to live our life is a blessing.
So often I have found myself taking it for granted.
Every hug from a family member. Every laugh we share with friends. Even the times of solitude are all blessings.
Every second of every day is a gift…
I can’t help but be thankful…“
That’s what the beautiful young woman, Jessica Ghawi, said in the end, the words she left behind to echo long after heart grew stiff and cold. Every second of every day is a gift — and I can’t help but be thankful. If you can’t help but be thankful — then talk thankful and think thankful and act thankful because this is how you help your one blessed life.
There is no real thankfulness unless it is to Someone and thankfulness only helps your life because who you are thanking is the One who is all your Help.
How did you grow so tall and lovely when I was somehow turned around?
They say that time does this, grows you up and beautiful and away.
But today just didn’t automatically birth from yesterday, a scientific materialization of more time. Time can’t beget more time. Each day comes from somewhere — from SomeOne.
When the sun comes up, you can right see it — each day is another gift birthed straight from the grace of God. Only God can beget more time.
It’s His Grace that made you lovely. Grace manifest, day after gift after day. How can I look at you and not just — get out of bed everyday startled at the gift of the day and make the day a startling gift back to Him. There isn’t success apart from giving your life away and who can’t do this right where they are?
Do you see this? How thankfulness to God for His grace – for another moment, for a Messiah, for a mission— is what in turn pours our live out as a grace?
ThankFULLness is the very thing that makes our lives run over to fill the empty ache of a hurting world.
I thought of that in Haiti. I thought of that after Aurora. Success is seeking God where others doubt He can be found. Go to those places and do that and what other response can there be but a thanksgiving that gives your life away, that is the gift back to Him? Could I want anything more for you?
That’s what you have to keep asking as you walk across this field, as you just keep on walking, and you can never stop asking: Why let one hurt fill your whole horizon — when right behind you God gives one thousand gifts to fill your whole life?
The thing is, girl — just turn around.
The tractor turns at the end of the field. The combine turns.
The heads of wheat all turned and ready.
And you turn.
And I want you to hear me — there will be days that pierce you.
Days that hurt and many of them: we all must lament — when you must cry but never deny the goodness of God.
But whenever you are about to howl to the heavens, “I don’t deserve this!”, close your eyes and remember Christ hanging on the cross and say it again aloud, “I don’t deserve this.”
Grace is the most revolutionary perspective of all and it will turn everything around.
The only real perspective to see anything by is grace.
And if you always turn toward His grace, the bullets and barbaric of this world cannot. touch. you. And you’ll only become more beautiful, and His grace alone will turn you around and carry you right out and beyond all the ugliness of this world. I promise you this.
Turn and lean into it, daughter, lean all into His love.
When you laugh again, beautiful girl we named Hope, that’s what I think: It may not be easy to be a woman in this world. But it is always perfect to be a woman in His hand.
Do you know how beautiful you are? A woman of Christ being made into a woman of grace.
It’s what you told me when we got home, when we stood in the kitchen with the plates and ran the water and filled the sink — you said that there was all these flecks of wheat that had blown into your hair.
And I could see them when you turned —
How all these flecks were making you into pure gold.
…. and my own turning around and counting more of His endless, One Thousand Gifts … thanks be to God for all of these blessings:
Reading the book of Romans as a family {#4120}
an old friend who stays close as I wrestle hard {#4121}
rain in the forecast ({#4122}
#8 on the NYTimes… thankfulness could change the world in Jesus’ name {#4123}
a son who willing travelled across the country this week to be a counsellor at Christian camp for at-risk kids {#4124}
a brother who drove him — and joins as a counsellor for the week {#4125}
this grace of serving at the Toronto event, Eucharisteo, a concert evening of symphony and praise, with 100% of proceeds to build a Compassion Child Development Center in the Philippines… I’d love to meet you there? {#4126}
The Retailer’s Choice Awards for 2102 — and the nearest I may ever be to Mr. Billy Graham? {#4127}
this year’s wheat harvest {#4128}
The way these firemen are real heros…. there’s always a ministry like this right around the corner? {#4129}
a daughter… the staggering grace of a daughter… {#4130}
all of His daughters… grateful for the gift of being a gift back to all of God’s daughters… {#4131}
Take July’s Joy Dare? Make it a month of Freedom from grumbling!
Thanks is a word that takes us before God and into the joy of our true homeland…
Print it for the fridge and dare everyone in the family to find these 3 gifts from His hand each day:
Click here to print July’s Joy Dare! Put it on the fridge! Dare the Kids! And begin this week — this month-- right!
Count three gifts a day, 1000 gifts in 2012 (and be entered to win the NikonD90 camera?)
Thank-you is a word that can change you, your world — the whole world!
HOW TO ENTER JULY’S GIVEAWAY:
Each day of July, either share your gifts on on Twitter {label with #1000gifts #JoyDare so we can find you!}, or with us in the gratitude community at Facebook , or on Pinterest (#1000gifts).
Each day, 3 people will who share their gifts via Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest will be randomly selected & entered into a drawing for JOY BASKET: a gift card @ Amazon {100$} & {signed copies of One Thousand Gifts, the photographic gift book
, the DayBrightner, and the family gratitude journal} Give thanks to Him in the assembly!
Join us? And happily change everything by keeping your own crazy list of One Thousand Gifts?
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!
Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-07-22 [del.icio.us]
@ TheRunAMuck... "You don’t know how brave you really are until you quieten down at the burning bush." What Amber said. Which is why there is a burning bush in the header of this place. Which is why love her and pray. For her and little Titus...
July 21, 2012
weekends are for quiet waiting
Creative Inspiration for the Weekend : Make your own Scripture Art this weekend with the kids… Beautiful! {You are living these 7 Habits of Creativity and making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}
Easy Kitchen Love for the Weekend : These no bake granola bars — ridiculously easy and perfect snack for summer (don’t have to turn on the stove!) Serve with watermelon cut out with cookie cutters!
Organization for the Weekend : Just. This. Organization. Tip. — Really. (Ah, I wish I had thought of this sooner!)
Camping for the Weekend : We always camp out on the back lawn … so these 10 Activities for Fun Backyard Camping … and then these 25 Delicious Campout Recipes
Perspective for the Weekend: As people pray for Colorado and discuss the nature of evil…. please read this. A first person account of the Aurora theater shooting. Don’t miss this.
Mama Encouragement for the Weekend : Looking for a Mentor? Sally Clarkson — who has written some of the very best mothering books I have ever read —… and some very encouraging words for mamas in the glorious trenches…
Make a Memory on the Weekend : 50 Fun Things to Do on a Trampoline
Truth on the Weekend : Don’t say No. Oh. Yes.
Prayers on the Weekend : Print this out — and pray these 31 Biblical Virtues for your kids. I’m joining you!
Worship for the weekend : Amazing Love… how can it be? And we know it’s true…. singing with you…
May the grace and truth of our Father surprise you all over again this weekend, friends…
Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Links for 2012-07-20 [del.icio.us]
@The High Calling ..."I tended to think of spiritual warfare as this dramatic, one-time encounter. Instead, I discovered that spiritual “victory” is only won in my living room each morning and in quiet moments at the office throughout the day as I retreat to pray."
When you can’t save them all
@ Eyvonne Sharp ... Good, Christ-filled words here... Thank you, Eyvonne...
The Fight for Glory
@The Gospel Coalition Blog ... wherever you are, whatever you face --- it is always a fight for His Glory alone.
Why We Need to Struggle
@ We are THAT Family ... exactly what she said.
What Should You Give?
@ NYTimes.... A fascinating, compelling look at the real statistics and the stories behind them... What would happen if this article was required reading for every family? Must. read.
Christian Book Distributor's frontpage "Recommended Read"...
of One Thousand Gifts... praying more come to give glory to the most exquisite Giver who deserves all our thanks..
July 20, 2012
When You Need an Answer to Prayers
A
s she swings higher at twilight, there is only quietness.
Only all these quiet prayers with the sun on the nape.
And the prayers, they are doing something, and it can be felt in the bones.
Prayer isn’t merely talking to God — it is being transformed by God.
Prayer is this moving towards God, heat of a holy fire, and feeling the dross burn away, burning away that word that comes too quickly, “I.”
Because “I,” it isn’t my name, but His — He alone is the the Great I AM.
Life, it’s not about me. It’s not about what I want. It’s about being wholly I AM‘s.
And in the praying — it becomes not about what I want — but what He wills.
The nearer you draw to a holy, loving God, all the “I”s, they burn away into this willing Yes.
There is light in the trees.
There is light in the leaves and in her hair falling and I watch how she throws her head back and she laughs —
the release of letting go — right into light.
:
:
:Click here to download a free Easter Devotional : A Trail to the Tree {please give it a few moments to download… thank you for grace!}
Ann Voskamp's Blog
- Ann Voskamp's profile
- 1368 followers
