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

by Ann Voskamp

Gifts He bestows. This writing it down—it is sort of like … unwrapping love.

Because that habit of discontentment can only be driven out by hammering in one iron sharper. The sleek pin of gratitude.

To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it.5

“To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it.”

Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.

I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life.

I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does.

Something always comes to fill the empty places. And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.

The only real prayers are the ones mouthed with thankful lips. Because gratitude ushers into the other side of prayer, into the heart of the God-love, and all power to change the world, me, resides here in His love.

prayer is to the goodness of God…. God only desires that our soul cling to him with all of its strength, in particular, that it clings to his goodness. For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking upon his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul.7

In Christ, don’t we have everlasting existence? Don’t Christians have all the time in eternity, life everlasting? If Christians run out of time—wouldn’t we lose our very own existence? If anyone should have time, isn’t it the Christ-followers?

I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing…. Through all that haste

Hurry always empties a soul.

Time is a relentless river.

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter.

here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.

In the present. I AM—His very name. I want to take shoes off. I AM, so full of the weight of the present, that time’s river slows to a still … and God Himself is timeless.

Thank God for the time, and very God enters that time, presence hallowing it. True, this, full attention slows time and I live the full of the moment, right to outer edges. But there’s more. I awake to I AM here. When I’m present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and … holy.

Jesus embraces His not enough … He gives thanks … And there is more than enough. More than enough! Eucharisteo always, always precedes the miracle.

I am thank-full. I am time-full.

Calm. Haste makes waste. 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?

life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

That in Christ, urgent means slow. That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence.

The fast have spiritually slow hearts.

I don’t reach forward and I don’t reach back and I weigh the moment down with full attention here. Life is dessert—too brief to hurry. You don’t wolf it down.

Here are gifts worth waiting 365 days for, gifts worth counting to one thousand for, gifts that will unbelievably emerge out of the deathly dark. Joy is always worth the wait, and fully living worth the believing. The pursuit!

Ann full of grace?

Katelynn full of grace

But awakening to joy awakens to pain. Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don’t numb themselves to really living.

Every dark woods has words. And every moment is a message from The Word-God who can’t stop writing His heart.

To read His message in moments, I’ll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word, to read His writing in the world.

I grip the card and I know all our days are struggle and warfare (job 14:14) and that the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy.

If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light—to fill with light. Bad eyes fill with darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly empty; empty is only a full, deepening darkness.

And it’s the Word of God that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, that makes the eyes see, the body full of light.

It is dark suffering’s umbilical cord that alone can untether new life. It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace. And grace that chooses to bear the cross of suffering overcomes that suffering.

And emptiness itself can birth the fullness of grace because in the emptiness we have the opportunity to turn to God, the only begetter of grace, and there find all the fullness of joy.

You may suffer loss but in Me is anything ever lost, really? Isn’t everything that belongs to Christ also yours? Loved ones lost still belong to Him—then aren’t they still yours? Do I not own the cattle on a thousand hills; everything? Aren’t then all provisions, in Christ also yours? If you haven’t lost Christ, child, nothing is ever lost. Remember, “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” [Acts 14:22 NASB], and in “sharing in [my Son’s] sufferings, becoming like him in his death” you come “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” [Philippians 3:10 NIV].

I have hacked my life up into grace moments and curse moments. The chopping that has cut myself off from the embracing love of a God who “does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow” (Lamentations 3:33), but labors to birth grief into greater grace. Isn’t this the crux of the gospel? The good news that all those living in the land of shadow of death have been birthed into new life, that the transfiguration of a suffering world has already begun. That suffering nourishes grace, and pain and joy are arteries of the same heart—and mourning and dancing are but movements in His unfinished symphony of beauty.

All is grace.

God is always good and I am always loved.

All is grace only because all can transfigure.

And me slowing for the hunt, looking for even one thousand more gifts, sanctuaries in moments, seeking the fullest life that births out of the darkest emptiness, all the miracle of eucharisteo.

Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don’t see God, I’ll bow down before something else.

“The life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration. It does not grow elsewhere,” writes J. I. Packer.

Looking is the love. Looking is evidence of the believing.

The cure against thanklessness’s bite? The remedy is in the retina.

How we behold determines if we hold joy. Behold glory and be held by God. How we look determines how we live … if we live.

“Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.”

faith is not a once-in-the-past action, but faith is always a way of seeing, a seeking for God in everything.

The only way to see God manifested in the world around is with the eyes of Jesus within. God within is the One seeing God without. God is both the object of my seeing and the subject who does the act of all real seeing, the Word lens the inner eye wears.