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

by Ann Voskamp

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

I enter the world like every person born enters the world: with clenched fists.

What does it mean to live full of grace? To live fully alive?

I await her unfurling and the rebirth. Instead the earth opens wide and swallows her up.

Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away. Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

I wake and put the feet to the plank floors, and I believe the Serpent’s hissing lie, the repeating refrain of his campaign through the ages: God isn’t good. It’s the cornerstone of his movement. That God withholds good from His children, that God does not genuinely, fully, love us.

Satan, he wanted more. More power, more glory. Ultimately, in his essence, Satan is an ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave.

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

Do we ever think of this busted-up place as the result of us ingrates, unsatisfied, we who punctured it all with a bite? The fruit’s poison has infected the whole of humanity. Me.

One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced.

“His secret

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

There’s a reason I am not writing the story and God is. He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means. I don’t.

“Maybe … I guess … it’s accepting there are things we simply don’t understand. But He does.”

They eat the mystery.

That that which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.

To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal. It is possible, wildly. I now see and testify. So this story—my story. A dare to an emptier, fuller life.

Doctor’s warning or not, the end will come, and this life of the bare toes across grass, the sky raining spring down on eyelashes, the skin spread close under sheets, blink of the fireflies on dusky June nights—all this will all end.

Will I have lived fully—or just empty?

Without this Jesus, no, no one can be ready.

But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?

How do we live fully so we are fully ready to die?

Isn’t it here? The wonder? Why do I spend so much of my living hours struggling to see it? Do we truly stumble so blind that we must be affronted with blinding magnificence for our blurry soul-sight to recognize grandeur? The very same surging magnificence that cascades over our every day here. Who has time or eyes to notice? All my eyes can seem to fixate on are the splatters of disappointment across here and me.

I don’t need more time to breathe so that I may experience more locales, possess more, accomplish more. Because wonder really could be here—for the seeing eyes.

With an expiration of less than twelve hours, what does Jesus count as all most important? “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them

“Without exception … all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is,

As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible. Joy is always possible. Whenever, meaning—now; wherever, meaning—here. The holy grail of joy is not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here! Here, in the messy, piercing ache of now, joy might be—unbelievably—possible! The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.

“The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live…. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for

Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.

Non-eucharisteo, ingratitude, was the fall—humanity’s discontent with all that God freely gives.

Our very saving is associated with our gratitude.

We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks.

“If the church is in Christ, its initial act is always an act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God,”

Thanksgiving—giving thanks in everything—prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

He took the bread, even the bread of death, and gave thanks.

“A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by

When I name moments—string out laundry and name-pray, thank You, Lord, for bedsheets in billowing winds, for fluff of sparrow landing on line, sun winter warm, and one last leaf still hanging in the orchard—I am Adam and I discover my meaning and God’s, and to name is to learn the language of Paradise.

“If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.

And I see it now for what this really is, this dare to write down one thousand things I love. It really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me.

Prayer, to be prayer, to have any power to change anything, must first speak thanks:

life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. J. R. R. Tolkien

“We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing”

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. 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

In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.

“On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the

Hurry always empties a soul.