Ann Voskamp's Blog, page 305
April 27, 2012
wkends are to be outstanding in your field
For walking out the door
to go stand out in some field
to startle at the momentousness
of sky and grass and breath in your lung
right now…
Blessings on your out-standing weekend, friends!
All’s grace because of Christ alone,
:
:
Beauty on the Weekend … scroll through {on the right} 102 Magnificent photos of God’s World. What a global jaunt of beauty! Marvel! And pray for this globe!
Creative Inspiration for the Weekend : Are you leaving out your little creative journal this weekend — a little Moleskine perhaps? Ah, the inspiration here! {You’re making happy time everyday to be creative, yes?}
Kitchen Love for the Weekend : Quick! Grab a pencil and put these on your grocery list (It’ll just take a minute — do it right now!) 100 Healthy Snack Ideas and these: 44 Healthy Foods for under $1 (we don’t eat all of these, but still encouraging!)
Free Printable for the Weekend : Just this week, hang this one or this one for the fridge …. because you or somebody who wanders through has to know the real wonder of this… Someone in your home needs to know these truths in their bones
Green on the Weekend : Best Perennials for your Garden and the best value plants for your garden
Kid Fun on the Weekend : Thinking even big kids might like this ? Of what if we all go for a walk and dreamed up something creative like this? — what fun are you planning this weekend?
Clean on the Weekend : Now isn’t this motivating?
Heart for the Weekend: While your cleaning, take a mini-marriage enrichment course? Taking Your Marriage Pulse: Six Questions — just jot these down right now. How could you weave these questions through your weekend?
Gifts for the Weekend : My favorite Mother’s Day gift ever – the kids and the Farmer did it all by themselv
es (the most inexpensive and most heart treasured gift! Another free tutorial here) {And if you are looking for a gift for your own beautiful Mama? Lifeway‘s let me know that it’s offering One Thousand Gifts at half price as a Mother’s Day gift feature, if that helps anyone? To make some heart space for real Joy…}
Joy on the Weekend: My wonderful friend, Liz Curtis Higgs, sang a bit of this song to me last week and I just had to share it with you! The kids here all think it’s wonderfully fun! Enjoy the Righteous Ruth Rap!
Worship for the weekend : Where I find myself again this weekend
May grace and truth 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!}
What Happens if You Really Believe… {Come to the Farm on Friday: Sermon on the Mount Video with hens}
Come to the farm on Friday?
Mount the Mount with us?
Consider the words of Jesus’s upending, uprighting Sermon …
And come be the lamb that knows the Shepherd’s voice…
the chick that tucks safe under the faithful offering of His wing.
CLICK HERE TO COME TO OUR FARM: Watch the video with our hens & my attempt to recite Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:1-35
{Consider pausing music by clicking the slider directly under the header? If you’re reading in a reader or via email, click here to view a less than word-perfect but heartfelt video recitation with our hens, of Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:1-35. }
“If we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God…
And that He came into this world and went to the cross of Calvary and died for our sins and rose again in order to justify us and to give us life anew and prepare us for heaven —
If you really believe that, there is only one inevitable deduction:
Namely that He is entitled to the whole of our lives
– without any limit whatsoever.”
Why Memorize?
“These instructions are not mere words–they are your life!”
Deu 32:47 NLT
And the important part to remember in memorizing (in life!):
It never matters if you can’t catch up. What matters is that you don’t give up!
How to Memorize the Sermon on the Mount
How to Memorize the Mount:
— committing His Words to heart & heart to Him
1. Just join us over here at Typer’s Memorize the MountA New Community to Aid us in Memorizing the Mount !
Scripture Typer has created Memorize the Mount community just for us!
A place where we type out our verses in increasing levels of memorization, have ways to message and encourage each other, and have profiles to track our progress! Our very own Mount community –
that helps us all together memorize the mount! It’s our very Life!
Seeing how many words a minute you can type your verses out is very motivating!
OR
2. Download & Print the Sermon on the Mount Memory Cards:Click here to print cards: Just 2-3 Verses a Week
3. Print and either have comb bound (cards are formatted to give space for comb binding), for ease of flipping cards, propping at the sink, etc.
4. Alternatively, cut and paste into a booklet like a pocket Moleskine
5. Find a partner to recite to — have them sign each week on the allotted line
(only *two to three short * verses a week – the verses are in the ESV version & take a bit to load. Thank you for grace!)The link for the Memorize the Mount Booklet Cover can be downloaded right here.
{You can join us in community on facebook for encouragement — and I’ll be posting audio updates and encouragements throughout the year on the Facebook page and here on the blog with link-ups so you can share your own memorization– consider joining us?}
Share your Memorizing of the Mount?
Over the weekend, link up right here to your audio, video or other creative recitation of your Memorization of the Mount.
It bears repeating: It never matters if you can’t catch up. What matters is that you don’t give up!
Let’s encourage each other! We’d love to catch a glimpse of your world and you mounting the Mount! (And too, go share your memorizing link also with the wonderful Katie at “Do Not Depart“)
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 2012-04-26 [del.icio.us]
on the NYTimes for One Thousand Gifts... God doing this amazing thing for only Himself alone, this revolution of gratitude, drawing hearts to give Him thanks in all things, all things, & what could be better than this?
Feeding My Fish
@Mom Heart Online... "I need to remember that I am to lead my children in being a person who celebrates the joy of life." Beautiful!
what is your anything?
@Jennie Allen ... have you shared your "anything"? Jennie Allen writes powerfully about surrendering your "anything" --- because God is your everything. This is doing good, deep work in me....
April 26, 2012
When You Want a Great Life Plan
The day after Resurrection Sunday, day after the world stopped because God had risen up and walked out of the earth —
his father came and sat at the table, and we hadn’t seen him in four months.
We served the last of the lamb and the first of that spinach.
And the Farmer sat at the table with his dad and they sit at the table and talk dirt and wheat and land and horsepower.
Opa Voskamp remembered how they never went out to the barn and the cows in the morning dark until they’d all kneeled as a family at the door and first prayed.
Who can expect to make sense of a loud world when they haven’t made quiet space before God?
Life is only noise until you’ve been quiet before God.
When one consistently chooses cyberspace over holy space — life becomes a hollow place.
I tell Hope to get berries to pour over the brownies.
We listen to two farmers at a table, a man and his son.
After dinner, the Farmer and his father walk out across the farmyard, through the shed, look at the tractors, stand at the edge of the field.
I watch how their hands move when they talk, like trees moving in wind, like when the Spirit moves and there is no standing still.
Opa’s older hands, the gnarled ones, arthritic and scarred, they touch the son’s shoulder now and then.
Those hands have come across an ocean of waves with a bride dated only three weeks, have milked cows by hands and picked rocks off fields by the bucket and held six sons and three daughters and a Bible after every meal for more than seventy years.
When he talks, his gesturing hands, they have no Dutch accent.
When he plowed, his hands folded over the wheel like in prayer. It’s true, anyone in workboots or an apron can be a hymn.
The Farmer, the younger one, his hands respond to his father’s, gestures of his own, and it’s like the passing of a torch.
In the morning, when the father is long gone, when the father has been hugged and kissed and has driven on to the next son with his farm and his son and fields to the north, the Farmer and I lay in the dark not yet day-broken and talk of four sons and two daughters and grief.
“It’s hard to think the window’s closed, that the boat’s left and it’s too late already.” That’s what he says before the day has even begun.
I close my eyes in the dark, like I can shut it all out, shut out the way the economy has barred us all out, how, now with the rising prices, it’s too late now to think of any of our kids finding a field of their own.
“Investors. Foreign, urban, they’ll own the land. And us here in workboots, we’ll be tenants, working the fields and growing food for owners far away.” His voice is so quiet in a house sleeping with all these kids and hopes.
I turn towards him.
“How could part of me think they’d go get degrees and not always have a bit of earth under their fingernails? What part of me ever stopped hoping they’d be brothers working the earth together?” I lay my hand on his cheek. “I think I just wanted them to be like you.”
Him like his father before him, like my father before me, like the way the wind blows and the Spirit moves and the bending over a row and praying for rain, bending to pray before you ever begin.
He takes my hand in his.
I can feel what we’ve weathered.
Will any of the kids ever know this?
“Should we move, try somewhere else?” I know my voice is pitched too high. Caleb will be 17 this year. How did we get here already? Is it ever possible to pray enough?
“Did we do this all wrong? Did we fail? Should we have been more focused in how to make a way for the kids? ”
And he turns to me, his grit grooved hands covenanted and holding mine.
“The only thing worth ever being focused on — is walking in the ways of the Lord.” The light’s moving up the window.
The whole room is lighting.
The Farmer says it about his sons and his daughters, about us:
“Whether you have much or little, the truth will just tell you plain: the only wealth you’ll ever have is God.”
Do any of us need more than that?
“The things is… When we think about what we want to leave for our children — Less is more.”
I nod slow.
Less goods can let there be more God.
Whenever you think you need more of this world, you lay out a welcome mat for the enemy.
When it comes to our legacy, to our lives, to our longings — less is always more.
We get out of bed and do what comes first.
We bow our heads.
And the emptiness of surrendered hands can fill with God.
::
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Resource: “Redeemed” wooden letters on our mantle
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!}
April 25, 2012
3 Things to Hold on to When Life Hurts {Cherry Blossoms in Rain}
S
he learned it haltingly in early spring, when the rain fell.
When the edge of Japan washed away.
When the sky slid down all the window panes.
And a Sunday in spring, when a tornado sky rips up the earth, leaving this fury of questions, she plays on, the same song.
Now surer, steadier.
I stand at the windowsill.
It still rains.
The tomatoes plants try to stand in west winds, strong and straight. It’s true of all the windowed eyes we look into:
Everyone carries their own inner rain.
Her notes, they start low, an accepting slow, a bass.
Then her fingers, then, they reach high, valleys calling to heights.
There’s an ache, a haunting echo, and the notes feel like the far oriental east, as far as He has removed all that inflicts and breaks ties and sins.
She plays the notes like a winging, like a long leaving, like standing at the edge of what once was and witnessing the losing of something pure and prayed for.
It is like Asia weeping, like a sky crying.
Apple trees blossom brave in the orchard, white clouds come down in the storm.
“This one,” I turn to her at the piano, “ — it always makes me hurt just a bit, Hope.” Is it the the beauty of the song?
The exquisite simplicity and delicate perfection of every river of notes, of every soaring?
Or is it the longing of it, the loss and lostness of it?
This is always the wondering, how pleasure and pain both flow mingled down, rain quenching us, rain eroding us away, and there is no extricating life from loss. Hope plays the upper octaves, a questioning too.
Where is God when the sky crushes close and wind sucks the life out lungs lying helpless in hospital beds, sheers off the trees and the dreams and the child right there at the knees?
Where is God when a racing wave rises higher and hungry and slams into old grandmothers hunched, swallows up whole cities in one ravenous lunge?
Where is God when clouds twist and contort and rage whirl and graves seem to lie just waiting for filling?
I had read it after the earth quaked, when the sea didn’t back down but rose, after tornadoes tore up towns and spit out stripped, staggering men, I had read the disillusionment:
“It all just seems so fake.
This idea that good things happen to good people… that the meek and righteous will inherit the earth.
There’s too many good people who suffer for something like that to be true.”
I nod, I nod…
She strokes the keys soft.
The high notes, a showering.
And maybe it does come down to this: this one question I pound on heaven’s door:
Where is God when good things happen to the very bad people, when music and love and apple orchards happen to the likes of me, broken and dirty and busted?
Where is God when bad things happen to the only kind of people there are — not good people, all of us. All people like all people, fallen and badly bruised and bad, none of us ever pure good?
Where is God?
God is on the Cross, and God is in the tomb, and God is upon the Stone rolled away.
God is on the throne and God shows us His scars and God holds the bottle to catch all our tears because He can’t bear to let our grief spill careless and lost, and where is God when bad things and good things happen to all the bad people made good by Him?
This is where He is and always is:
The problem of evil is answered by the presence of Emmanuel: God is with us.
Hope leans into the ivories, a drawing closer, and the song, it is a far east clarion, and I whisper it, “What is this one called, Hope?”
The late light makes her a silhouette at music.
A shadow in song.
She hardly touches the melody, and she doesn’t have to, it already moving in me, and she murmurs it over the lilting, “Cherry Blossoms in Rain.”
Ah, exactly. That is it, this feeling lured out by the notes:
Petals flying away in the wind, the beauty falling all around — beauty and falling, grace…and grief. Our blooming whiteness in the orchard, those trees we planted years ago.
There is that phrase of the Psalmist’s song:
May those who sow in tears….
~Psalm 126:5-6
All these tears, all this rain. And yet… there is sowing, there is planting.
True, we may cry, but we press on for the crop.
We may sorrow but we still sow. And though we are broken, we still bend and begin; we do our work though we weep.
We tell our hurts we must still do the task at hand if we hope to harvest; though we may not feel like it, the fields need seeds.
So we hang out the clothes as we try to hang on, and we stir the pot as all the pain spills, and we still sow though in tears, and let go of every seed, burying hopes and hurts in faith, and out of loss, new life will unfurl, our tears watering rows.
God is with us. And it’s His tender with-ness that binds up the wounds.
Hope plays the song again, a grace touch in tears.
And again there’s an ache, a haunting echo —
After the last high note, Hope whispers it into the stilled dark: “Mama? That whole song?
The whole song – it’s played on the black notes. “
Life’s a piano. And it easy to think that the white keys are pure joy while all the black keys are pure grief.
But the thing is — The black notes can make music too.
The black notes can choose joy too.
The black notes — they are there to sing songs too.
Out in the orchard petals rise on the wind, blossoms in the rain.
And rain drips off the eave, making music down the walk.
She plays on, black notes playing high and long…
::
3 Things to Hold on to When Life Hurts
1. God is with us — And it’s His tender with-ness that binds our wounds
2. Work though you weep. Sorrow — but still sow.
3. In the mourning – keep listening for the music.
Click here to listen to Hope playing Cherry Blossoms in Rain… (first pause the music player under header, clicking on the double bar?)
Related: The Resurrection Season Series
When you are burying all your hopes and dreams
Has Anyone Seen Signs of the Easter People
When it Comes Time to Really Die
When There’s a Search for Eyewitnesses
How the Kids and the Next-Door Neighbors Might Really Become Christians
Tomb-Centered Christianity? Why it makes all the difference
What if More than Celebrating Easter, we lived it
repost from the archives
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
Next Week, might we prayerfully consider together: The Practice of Gospel: Looking for New Life We look forward to your thoughts, stories, reflections….
Today, if you’d like to share with community: The Practice of Gospel … 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!}
Links for 2012-04-24 [del.icio.us]
@Margaret Feinberg ... with a giveaway of 3 copies of One Thousand Gifts...
April 24, 2012
A Prayer for When You’re on the Edge: ‘grant me grace to fall into His arms’
To be read, prayed, slowly…
‘O God,
I bless thee for the happy moment
when I first saw thy law fulfilled in Christ,
wrath appeased, death destroyed, sin forgiven,
my soul saved….
I want no other rock to build upon than that I have,
desire no other hope than that of gospel truth,
need no other look than that which gazes
on the cross…
May my cry be always, Only Jesus! only Jesus!
In Him I have all that I can hold;
enlarge me to take in more…
If I am tempted, and have no wit,
give me strength enough to trust in Him…
If in extremity,
let me feel that He can deliver me;
If driven to the verge of hope
and to the pit of despair,
grant me grace to fall into His arms.
O God, hear me,
do for me more
than I ask, think, or dream.”
~ excerpted from Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions
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 2012-04-23 [del.icio.us]
the trailer of Kinshasa Symphony Documentary: "based in the war- and poverty-stricken capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo: a dozen musicians and half as many instruments, and a dream to tackle the masterpieces of the classical repertory. The trailer reveals just how remarkable the sheer existence of this orchestra is..." Such an inspiration...
Free $25 Paper Coterie Gift Certificate
@ The Mom Creative ... have you checked out Jessica's blog? The free gift certificate is just the cherry on top!
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Look for the Beauty
@ We are THAT Family ... and it's all found in Jesus! Practical post!
April 23, 2012
What Your Scars Can Really Be …
In the kitchen, after supper, while we stack the plates, she pulls up her sleeve to shows me her scars.
“Did you see this one here on my arm?” When she bends, a tendril falls across her face, and her finger traces this whorl and I can see how the skin pulls, how pain is embroidered right into her.
She is six and she is marked. And there is still so much road ahead.
How many decades will she wear these scars? How will she stretch the memory of these things right around her? And when will the hard, risen edge of the wound fade away?
“And this one’s from a burn.”
I’m scraping wilted lettuce leaves, soggy with dressing, off the plate and she’s pointing her index finger straight up like a signpost, so the pale white line of the heat that branded her can catch the light from the window.
She’s holding her scarred finger straight up in the light — and she looks just like Patsy, when Patsy had turned, that’s what I think.
When Patsy had turned and held her index finger straight up and then pointed to herself.
“I had agoraphobia too.” That’s what Patsy had said to me, her chair next to mine in a room of women, her red glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose, her eyes not leaving mine. She had pointed her finger up, like a raising of a hand, like a joining of this sorority of suffering. “So I know,” she said… “I know.”
She reached over to squeeze my hand and my chin trembled. I had squeezed back. We aren’t ever alone.
The decades had pulled and she had grown into Him and white haired and exquisite, Patsy, she had shown me her scars.
And Angie talked of the moment her baby girl took her last earthly breath and how she didn’t know how to keep breathing.
When she spoke of holding Audrey for the last time, her hands shook like a leaf in the wind.
Lisa shared her begging prayers for a child and Liz passed down the salad dressing and spoke of a checkered past and a blessed baptism and a forgiven life.
Elisa read from Luke and showed me her heart shards and we nodded and brimmed and prayed.
Afterwards, Shannon and I sat on a park bench and the water fountain reflected in the lamplight and she poured it all out right there, about the accident and the ambulance and the funeral and the police.
The water fountain had kept falling, scarring the surface of the pond.
Healing, somehow healing.
“Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world,” is what I had written in One Thousand Gifts, in my own scar-story.
“Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world — because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, “I know. I know.”
He shows us His scars.
He knows.
He knows.
Sandi had stood after dessert and cleared her throat and sang it.
Patsy had smiled and clapped.
Elisa and Liz and Lisa had cheered.
And I had bowed my head, the whole room, right to the ceiling, right to the ends of us, filling with Sandi’s notes,
“I see trees of green— red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you —
And I think to myself —- what a wonderful world….”
And I had looked around at a room full of broken women, scars on their stories and Jesus on their lips and the water fountain bloomed hope over the pond and the wounded women held hands and Truth was happening in us:
“And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”(Romans 5:2-4)
The scar-stories matter not because of the pain but because of what the scarred can make of Him — and there is always the choice to be sorry for our selves or bring glory to our Savior.
The women sang.
And the whole room spun on this spinning wounded, wonderful world and you could see it reflecting in all the eyes, all the smiles, all His joy.
“Correctly then is this world called the mirror of divinity;” wrote John Calvin
. ”
Not that there is sufficient clearness for man to gain a full knowledge of God by looking at the world, but… the faithful, to whom he has given eyes, sees sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing.” That’s what Calvin had said. “The world was no doubt made that it might be the theater of divine glory.”
And when Sandi hit the high notes — “What a wonderful world” — the room became that, this theater of divine glory, no doubt the whole world made to be this.
And the faithful, the ones to whom He has given eyes, can see it in all the glittering, all the shimmering, in all the smiles and the tears and the stories…
“Do you think the scar will ever go away, Mama?”
A six-year-old asks me this in the kitchen, her finger, her white wound, still pointing. For those with eyes to see, to look along all of life, all is a line leading straight to God.
I set the plate on the counter.
I touch her mark, hardly touch the curve of her mark. I can hear Sandi singing. And see Patsy’s finger pointing to her herself.
And all those beautiful, wounded women holding hands.
“The scars can be beauty marks.” I tell this one little girl, a girl just beginning down her road. “The scars can carve you to be more like Christ.”
Beauty always bears scars because of Love.
And she nods, holding her scar there in the light….
And it’s even here in the scars —
these certain sparks of glory.
:
:
“Now if we are children, then we are heirs–heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in His sufferings in order that we may also share in His glory.” ~ Romans 8:17
“… the faithful, to whom He has given eyes, sees sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing.” ~ John Calvin: Commentary on Hebrews
praying to have eyes to see “to see sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing” (John Calvin)…. the endless One Thousand Gifts …
#3407… Shalom reading each morning to me from The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name
, her scarred little finger pointing out each word
#3408… the Farmer and his grin bringing me purple lilies
#3409…. a sixteen-year-old son greeting me in the morning with “I love you, Mom.”
#3410…. us all reciting it around the table, the memorization of our Sermon on the Mount verses
#3411…. reading Martyn Lloyd Jones’ Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
#3412…. early morning tea with a dear friend
#3413…. serving beautiful Jesus-sisters alongside my Women of Faith sisters this fall
#3414… ”But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when His glory is revealed.” {1 Peter 4:13}
Print April’s Joy Dare and begin this holy 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!
And a happy new surprise for April:
Each day of April, 3 people who share their 1000 gifts Joy Dare for the day, one on Twitter {label with #1000gifts #JoyDare so we can find you!}, one sharing their gifts in the gratitude community at Facebook , and one on Pinterest (#1000gifts), will be randomly selected & entered into a drawing for a gift card @ Amazon {100$} & joy-in-a-box {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 2012-04-22 [del.icio.us]
... an interview discussing One Thousand Gifts with Charles Morris of Haven Today ...
A Mom? You have the Best Job in the world....
... beautifully powerful, this.
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