One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

by Ann Voskamp

“Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.”

I don't normally read books twice, but I'm glad I'm reading this one again.

Life is not an emergency. Life is eucharisteo.

I know it. That life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

Who will I lose? And that’s definite: I will lose every single person I have ever loved. Either abruptly or eventually.

All human relationships end in loss. Am I prepared for that?

How can I help this son of mine see when I can’t see? The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?

You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them

are nothing more nor less than blasphemies—though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God’s] beloved children curse it because they do not

know it for wha...

Weeks later, my aunt sent a letter. From a far-flung hotel, stamped in some post office on the other side of the ocean. It was her looping, aching epiphany that scrawled me deep: “I will never forget your daughter’s wild joy in that ball—a happiness like I have never seen in all my travels through all these years. And in the simplest of experiences.” I never forgot—the child-joy of that afternoon … or my aunt’s words. Yes, otherworldly joy, like that. The kind you could search the world over—and find only in a child. I pluck Little-One’s pink-flowered dress from the laundry basket and hold it in hand. It’s because she’s small. Is that it? The secret to a child’s language of laughter, their domain of delight, is perspective. If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude. Those child photos, that wonder I experienced firsthand through her eyes—“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it!”1—was that it? I had just held evidence of it. The joy of small that makes life large.

Yes! Thankful for the smiles and laughter of children! So joyful!