Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 298
June 22, 2012
How to Pray {Friday on the Farm}
She prayed and she worked and the prayers were the work that would outlast fire.
And that is what she thought, there at the window with the cloth in her hand.
Pray with eyes on Christ and not on the crisis.
Because when you pray with eyes on Christ and not on the crisis — your prayers are always answered: He edifies, He embraces, He is enough.
What would it be like to live like that — all the moments a prayer with eyes of the heart all on Christ?
She could see that through the window pane right there that morning —
the light out in the garden and right down between all the shadowed rows.
::
::
::
::
“If you want that splendid power in prayer —
you must remain in loving, living, lasting, conscious, practical, abiding union with the Lord Jesus Christ.”
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 2012-06-21 [del.icio.us]
@Lisa Leonard's .... ever felt something you made or someone you love was being laughed at? This.... I have felt exactly like this about one book I wrote, about living out the Christ-life in front of those who have laughed and mocked, about one beautiful family person I so love --- Lisa writes how she has responded with a brave grace. Stunning post written out of an even more stunning life...
June 21, 2012
1 Step Towards Raising Happier Kids…
Dear Ann,
This morning my 12 year old son told me he’s about to reach his four thousandth thankfulness journal entry.
I bought One Thousand Gifts at the 2011 KWCHEA homeschooling conference and heard you speak there [about How to Raise Grateful Kids].
At the time, my son was preparing for a regional track meet and was quite beside himself with anxiety. [He had a long history of difficulty with this (as well as sadness) - as did both his parents! In fact I am convinced that were it not for finding freedom in Christ I would still be seeing psychiatrists and on medication.]
Anyway — I got my son to start listing things for which he is thankful each morning and evening. I forget how many items I suggested he list at the beginning, but he started exceeding it and over the course of about three days he went from being unbearably anxious about his track meet to basically fine — a little twinge of nervousness here and there, but not the debilitating fear he had had.
Over the next year, he continued his gratitude journal and there have been many occasions when he has been anxious and dealt with it by listing more things to give thanks to God for. He has been able to do many things which previously I think would have been too intimidating (sleepover at camp, etc).
So thank you! God worked through the message of giving thanks to Him in all things to bring great blessing to us.
My son actually recommended it recently to his dad (!), who was starting a new job and feeling a little nervous!
Sincerely,
A Grateful Mom
When a Teacher and Kids Give Thanks for 1000 Gifts
{Full article here in the Hilton Head Newspaper}
When a Summer Camp takes Up the Dare
{An after school and summer camp program for school-aged children at a church, read One Thousand Gifts and “decided that our summer camp theme this year would be “Grateful not Grumbling.”
We’ve been making a gift list together and having the kids suggest things to add to it after lunch each day. It’s wonderful to see how they don’t want to stop adding to the list.
One little girl even made her own list at home and brought it in to share. We’re also weaving “GnG” into other parts of our day, such as when we read a book together after lunch. Here is a photo of our list so far for you. We’re up to 175 gifts and have only been at camp for 8 days.
Thank you for sharing — It’s changed my life and is now changing the lives of these kids.”}
6 Reasons Why to Teach Kids to Be Grateful
The research can only support Scriptural Truth:
1. Better Attitudes:
Children who practice grateful thinking have more positive attitudes toward school and their families (Froh, Sefick, Emmons, 2008).
2. Better Achieve Personal Goals:
Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.
3. Closer Relationships, Greater Happiness:
Professor Froh infused middle–school classes with a small dose of gratitude—and found that it made students feel more connected to their friends, family, and their school:
“By the follow–up three weeks later, students who had been instructed to count their blessings showed more gratitude toward people who had helped them, which led to more gratitude in general. Expressing gratitude was not only associated with appreciating close relationships; it was also related to feeling better about life and school. Indeed, compared with students in the hassles and control groups, students who counted blessings reported greater satisfaction with school both immediately after the two–week exercise and at the three–week follow–up.”
4. Better Grades:
Gratitude in children: 6-7th graders who kept a gratitude journal for only three weeks, had an increased grade point average over the course of a year.
5. Greater Energy, Attentiveness, Enthusiasm:
A daily gratitude intervention (self-guided exercises) with young adults resulted in higher reported levels of the positive states of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy compared to a focus on hassles or a downward social comparison (ways in which participants thought they were better off than others).
6. Greater Sensitivity:
Children who kept gratitude journals were more sensitive to situations where they themselves can be helpful, altruistic, generous, compassionate, and less destructive, more positive social behaviors, and less destructive, negative social behaviors…
“Gratitude is good for the giver, and good for the receiver,” Professor Emmons said. “This has been documented in friendships, romantic partners and spouses. One study showed that the mere expression of thanks more than doubled the likelihood that helpers would provide assistance again.”
And if We Don’t Practice Gratitude?
On the other hand, research shows that youth who are ungrateful are “less satisfied with their lives and are more apt to be aggressive and engage in risk-taking behaviors, such as early or frequent promiscuous activities, substance use, poor eating habits, physical inactivity, and poor academic performance.”
Research from: Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier
Want More Grateful Kids?
15 Ways to Raise More Grateful KidsClick 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 2012-06-20 [del.icio.us]
@ The High Calling... "It makes me wonder: what if we consistently took our kids seriously? What if we partnered with them in ways that could shepherd their interests into possible businesses?"
June 20, 2012
How to Live Your Best Life?
‘Idon’t have much time left, really.”
My father’s voice on the other end of the line reminds me of my grandfather’s.
It’s been nearly ten years since I heard that voice. I’m making beds. I can see Dad at his breakfast table.
“At best, maybe fifteen years. I’m on my last chapter.” He pauses and I let the empty space beckon answers.
Grandpa died at eighty. Dad will turn sixty-three this coming year.
“I need a plan. I don’t think I’ve had one.”
I pull the sheets up, smooth out the bed’s coverlet in coming light, then wait, listening to Dad think.
I’m hesitant to say anything. Best he find the way.
But I’m still, just standing here, knowing that we are moving out into hallowed ground. I wait. Then venture into the space with only a question.
“Well, how do you want that last chapter to read, Dad?”
“I want to end happy.”
I sit on the edge of the bed, sunlight warm on my back, and ask slowly, “And what do you think brings happiness?”
He’s probing in the silence, the back corners of being, looking for what lies in unexamined places. I’m praying.
“More farming.”
“More farming?” I make an effort but I know the words still sound incredulous.
“My father farmed his whole life and made nothing…. But he thought someday folks would pay farmers for their work. That might happen in my lifetime. Can’t quit now. And maybe someday the grandkids will talk about how I could grow a crop of corn.”
I can see Dad sitting at his table, looking out the bay window, watching rows of pride growing up into light.
“What about the people? The relationships?” I let the words sit.
And he goes in another direction, approaches it all from the other side.
“Alan Strand called the other day.” Every time I’ve seen Alan Strand, he’s wearing denim coveralls, a worn-through cap.
“He was trying to figure out whether to spend the time he’s got left restoring another tractor, buying a new engine for it — or if he should try to track down his daughter. He hasn’t heard from her in ten years. Doesn’t even know where she is.”
Now this seems pretty obvious to me.
“And he decided?”
“The tractor.”
I shake my head, only a bit stunned. The words dribble out. “He intentionally considered the options, voiced them to you… and then decided the tractor?”
“Yep. He knew how to do the tractor. Little risk. The daughter, she was all risk. And you know….”
I can’t stop shaking my head. None of this makes any sense.
And yet it does.
“Do we give up what makes us really happy — farming, restoring tractors, writing, study, whatever we are good at it— a lifetime of happiness—for a few days of happiness at the end? Do we sacrifice what makes us really happy day in and day out, for a few days of happiness with the people at the end?” Dad says it certain and I can hear the pain. “There are no guarantees with the people.”
I’m stirred.
Before I can think, I rush along, finding what I’m looking for, my rock.
I say the words more to myself than to him, words leaving my mouth before I can think.
“Jesus said, ‘He who loses his life will gain it.’”
The other end of the phone is quiet.
Tentatively, I step out a bit further. “Maybe making small sacrifices in personal pursuits – in the end we will know a happiness we couldn’t have imagined.”
I circle back, wondering if he’s following.
“Maybe this is one way we live out what Jesus us calls us to.” I say the words again, deliberately, for they seem new to me, richer in ways I hadn’t considered. “He who loses his life will find it.”
Dad lets his voice expose where he is. “Yeah. Maybe….”
I let him find his way…
“But maybe none of us can change really.” His voice sounds so old…
“Great artists, great actors, great politicians, its all the same. They do what makes them happy and that means they don’t have much time for people. Balance is a hard thing. Nearly impossible if we are going to do something well. And we’re wired the way we are. Maybe those around us just have to come to accept it.”
I hurt inside.
“I am too old to change. I know farming.” He sounds just like Grandpa.
Then he’s talking about the price you can get for a bushel of corn and the weather forecast for the next few weeks.
And I’m thinking about the times I’ve been in my own bubble with my own agendas of accomplishments, drifting away from people and the true happiness disguised.
I’m remembering with a strange sadness a woman standing amidst the floral memorials of her mother’s funeral, telling us of her mother’s far-and-wide reputation for the important stuff of bleach and immaculate housekeeping.
I’m thinking about the time I’ve chosen to wash windows, tend a flowerbed, answer an email, instead of playing a game of bananagrams
with a trio of loud boys, read an Eloise Wilken story 
to pleading eyes.
My pride was tangled up in the tasks.
Why doesn’t it always matter more to love well?
Is it because relationships don’t bring us paychecks or praise?
Loving well, stepping over hurt, laying aside self and desires, draws on more of our interior resources than investing in a career, a skill, a personal pursuit. And yet, there are no promotions. No public status. No guarantees.
Relationships grow only in the soil of humility, selflessness, open-handedness. Relationships are inherently risky: for all that, you can’t control the outcome.
Investing in relationships requires courage. It mandates daily fortitude and intentionality to make moment by moment decisions to prioritize relationships while balancing vocational demands.
Do my daily decisions support my belief that relationship is the essence of reality? Or do I merely pay lip service to relationship — while the use of my hours clearly reveals true priorities?
The value of your life — is the value of your relationships. With God and men.
Dad’s talking about what he’s got to get done this week. I am my Father’s daughter.
“Look at the time.” I can see him turning there at the table, looking up at that clock ticking loudly over the kitchen sink. “And what am I doing sitting here? I’ve got so much to do and here I am talking the day away with you.”
I have to smile. Dad’s customary call always ends with this customary adieu.
“Always good talking with you, Dad.”
And then he’s gone.
Off to write more farming, more of what he’s good at, into that last chapter of his life story. And I gather Bibles for church and more of hearing Jesus’ words to come crucify self, words I need to hear again and I’ll forget and need to hear again.
Monday dawns a week of holidays, days of flag waving and patriotism.
Farmers don’t know holidays. Livestock needs feeding 365 days a year. But we finish barn chores early, eat dinner, gather lawn chairs to head up to the lake and fireworks over water. Something we rarely did as kids. We try to make memories. We try to leave the work. We keep trying the investing in people.
Sun’s sunk deep down into water, only a glow of embers burning along the horizon, when we haul our lawn chairs across the grass up at the lake. The shoreline’s full of people. Shadows and glow necklaces and laughter and kids slurping blue freezies out of plastic.
I point straight ahead. Is there a spot there for the lawnchairs? The Farmer nods. Yes, there — there’s enough room for us there.
There should be room enough for us there beside that silhouette with a farmer’s cap. Kids run with their chairs slung over their shoulders.
The sihouette turns. The youngest turns. And then she laughs, running through shadows into shadows.
“Grandpa!”
He set aside self — he wrote sacrifice into his story.
I walk through shadows.
My hand finds the shoulder of that flannel plaid jacket and he finds my hand. He pulls me closer. He brushes my cheek with that leathery skin.
“Ann…” His voice is soft, full of things he can’t say.
“Dad.” I squeeze his hand, a long, lingering pulse of all I feel.
And then fireworks bloom.
These mirror images rock gently on water, two spaces merging and petals of color falling.
The children pull up on Grandpa’s lap, lean in close.
And I think how children will talk about this yield of time.
How in our dark places, we sacrifice and find faces and light and happiness unexpected.
The skies explode. Light rains down. I am in this story with these people. What is the plan for this flash of days?
I look over at Dad.
We are not too old to take courage.
We are not too late to sacrifice.
We are not too lost to reach out to each other and linger on the rim of time.
Relationship is the art of sacrifice that makes the days a masterpiece.
Somewhere in our dark, we can forget all that is lost —
for the tender wonder of what could be found….
“He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” ~Jesus
A repost of memories of another Canada Day
Every Wednesday, we Walk with Him, posting a spiritual practice that draws us nearer to His heart. To read the entire series of spiritual practices
This week, and the next two weeks, might we prayerfully consider together: The Practice of Citizenship: How You Live Here When You’re Home is in HeavenWe look forward to your thoughts, stories, reflections….
Today, if you’d like to share with community: The Practice of Citizenship: How to live here when your home is in heaven … just quietly slip in the direct URL to your exact post….. If you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.
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!}
June 19, 2012
How to Unplug {More}: 10 Things to Do {Pick 1 Before You Click}
Print out and tape to the side of every screen:
Why slow down and unplug {more}:
‘They say time is money, but that’s not true.
Time is life.
And if you want the fullest life, you need to find fullest time.
God gives us time. But who has time for God?
This makes no sense.
Life is not an emergency. Life is brief and it is fleeting but it is not an emergency.
Emergencies are sudden, unexpected events — but is anything under the sun unexpected to God?
In Christ, urgent means slow.
In Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence.
Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential — a bubble held in awe.
Life is dessert — too brief to hurry. You don’t wolf it down.
And the thing is: Hurry always empties a soul. Hurry makes us hurt.
And maybe it is the hurt that drives us on?
For all our frenzied running seemingly toward something, could it be that we are in fact fleeing—desperate to escape pain that pursues?
And this, this is the only way to slow time:
When you fully enter time’s swift current, when you enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, you slow the torrent with the weight of you all here.
You only live the full life when you live fully in the moment.
And when you’re always looking for the next glimpse of God’s glory, you slow and enter and time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with your full attention —
and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows….”
~ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
{RSS Readers: Click here to view “How to slow down and figure out to life…” … Consider just clicking off the music slider at the very top of the blog, right under the header? Thank you for grace…}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 2012-06-18 [del.icio.us]
... @Angie Smith... worth every second of the read.
Photoshopping Our Souls Away
@Darling Magazine... "our most valuable and defining parts are not visible to a camera. When a woman knows this beyond a doubt, she is so much more attractive." (HT: Patricia)
June 18, 2012
How to be One of the Strong …………… {and What Christian Sacrifice is Really}
That’s the thought that struck me standing there with all of them under the sky.
That collapsed all the clouds into this one loop of surprising wonder.
How could I have ever known he’d be a father like this and in Christ, is anything ever really a sacrifice?
On a weekend about fathers, we stand in a field at an airport and watch the swooping of wings.
I had blustered that we were going to be late. He had murmured that it really was going to be okay.
On the two hour trip to the airfield, I had dozed off and left him to the wild navigation of the darling, albeit uninformed, GPS woman who keeps recalculating and to the six kids playing the license plate game far too loud.
I do, however, remember to bring the suntan lotion and smile just a little bit competently. And in typical flailing fashion, I forget it in the van and we bake just a bit crimson, our noses cranked right up to the sky.
I don’t know why he puts up with me most days and grace never makes any sense at all.
We’d hauled one strap-stretched bag, 3 thermoses, six kids, and seven lawn chairs across the airfield.
We’re one lawn chair short.
The Farmer winks. “No problem.” He stands. He swings Shalom up on his shoulders so she can see over the crowd. How does a good man do that — let us all stand straight up on his shoulders?
Is this sacrifice?
Planes swoop and spin and sonic burst ear drums and the crowd murmurs awe and I stand behind, eyes on him, the quiet man, and watch how he lays a hand on a shoulder, how he pulls a son in closer, and life in Christ can be choreographed grace. The strong do this…
Plane wings tips fly in perfect space.
The crowds cheers.
Boys hoot and holler and clap and the father of our children flashes this smile.
I think my heart might explode with thanks, hands raised to the sky.
Saved and redeemed and sanctified, worship flows from all the thankfulness for this. Worship doesn’t breathe apart from thanksgiving — And the essence of worship is essentially eucharisteo.
And that is what takes off into the airspace: The authentic worship of a Christian is the surrendering of any notion of independence from God and an acceptance of everything as a gift from God. Planes free fall straight down. And real men let go of self-sufficiency and know it’s all pure grace and pull it straight out into lifestyle, wholesale thanksgiving.
The CF-18 throttles wide open….
And I see how he does this — how one man loves. I see how one man loves us all. I see how one man sacrifices his life and what a life of all sacrifice is.
Christian sacrifice isn’t ever giving to God what He wouldn’t have without us.
Christian sacrifice is receiving from God what we’d never have without Him.
This is what collapses my lungs.
Being receptive to radical grace — this is the crux of radical sacrifice.
The strongest do this.
After Sunday services on Father’s Day, he and I carry our Bibles to our room, slip our shoes off, sit on the edge of our bed, fall back on the quilt in Sabbath relief and we lay there, staring up at the ceiling.
“You asked Caleb to grill the pork chops?” He asks it slow, his eyes closed. The man works tirelessly hard. I’d given Cale the BBQ sauce as he took the chops out to the grill on the porch.
That’s when I hear it in the surprising still of the house. Hear it there in our bedroom, the door opened wide.
“Hear them? I think they’re all out on the porch, all of them?” I whisper it over to him.
And we listen. And there’s this soaring and it’s so quiet, like a flying in perfect synchronicity.
“Hymns?” He says it with this quiet smile. “They’re out there singing hymns?”
Half a dozen voices, all his children, they’ve spontaneously burst into worship on the porch and we can hear it in baritones and soprano, a sonic symphony — “A Mighty Fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.”
“This is the gift.”
They’re singing “O the deep, deep love of Jesus” now. We can hear Joshua leading them on, loud and clear and low.
How did they all end up out on the porch around the BBQ in song, in unison, and who knew you could direct a hymn-sing with a stainless steel spatula and they don’t even know they have an audience, that their father’s listening, this smile large on his face.
He murmurs awe of his own. “They don’t even know it, but this is the gift right now.”
And I’m rooted right here, the airspace filling, this grateful worship all filling.
Thanksgiving is the gift back.
And being receptive to sovereign grace, just as He gives it, is the life of Christian sacrifice. And how else do you is bless your Father apart from gratitude for all these gifts bestowed?
And the Farmer, he lays there, his face turned heavenward.
His heart in this strongest free fall into grace, all his children’s voices rising in thanks to the skies…
::
::
::
:: :: ::
…. counting more of His endless, One Thousand Gifts … thanks be to God
sanding wooden floors… {#3693}
making him eggs early… {#3652}
his wink … {#3694}
happily staying at home to celebrate a little girl’s birthday instead of attending a gala where One Thousand Gifts won Best Canadian Inspirational Book for 2012in the Canadian Christian Writing Awards {#3697}
bubbling up of cooking pancakes… {#3696}
holding his hand on the way home from church {#3698}
a long list for a new week {#3699}
thinking about this… {#3699}
irises in rows in the garden … {#4000}
Colossians 2:7: “Rooted and built up in Christ, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” {#4001}
Take June’s Joy Dare?Take June’s Joy Dare?
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 June’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 JUNE’S GIVEAWAY: (The Winner of May’s Joy in a basket is Lynn Pottenger … thank you for giving Him thanks for the gifts, Lynn!)
Each day of June, 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!}
June 16, 2012
weekends are for fathers
Creative Inspiration for the Weekend : oh, how about this for some happy photo fun this weekend? {You’re making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}
Kitchen Love for the Weekend: Just for Dad: Saturday night put everything in the slow cooker — and wake up a sausage breakfast all ready for Dad?
Free Printable for the Weekend : 20 Fun ways to Celebrate Dads! … and if a dad you know likes A&W like the Farmer does? (or the tag for a soda pop) Or a sweet tooth — a whole basket of these. And a shirt pocket card for a gift certificate? Perfect free printables to make a fun gift!
Make a Memory on the Weekend : What if you did something really amazing like this for Dad? Number the envelopes for how many years old you are — and write out one memory for each year? Or make it collective — with all the siblings and grandkids joining in too? A memory Dad may never forget?
Clean on the Weekend : Steps to an organized car and How to Really Detail a Car — a great gift for Dad this weekend?
Worship for the weekend : Come to Me … Isn’t this beautiful — our Father calling us to come to Him? The song — the truth of it. Singing it with you this weekend, friends…
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 2012-06-15 [del.icio.us]
... to offer the photography gift book, "Selections from One Thousand Gifts" ... at more than 60% off the regular price: Only $5.00 for the full color hardback --- Might be the perfect gift for someone who needs a bit of beauty and joy and encouragement?
If you ever think about quitting
.... Shaun Groves' post is worth at least a couple of reads... and then to faithfully pray...
Ann Voskamp's Blog
- Ann Voskamp's profile
- 1368 followers
