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

by Ann Voskamp

Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives. Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes! to His grace.

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

C. S. Lewis said it too, to a man looking for fullest life: “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 bad.”

The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life—in my life—is lack of thanksgiving.

I take to heart the words of Thomas Aquinas, who defined beauty as id quod visum placet—beauty as that which being seen, pleases.6 And if all the work of transfiguring the ugly into the beautiful pleases God, it is a work of beauty. Is there anything in this world that is truly ugly? That is curse?

Every time you feel in God’s creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say: “O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy art Thou Thyself, Creator of all! Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

What is this that I feel sitting here, coursing through me relentless, hot, ardent? I have to seek God beauty. Because isn’t my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don’t see God, I’ll bow down before something else.

“Why would you throw that at him?” I’m too shrill, too gaped, too blind-white angry. Straw comes in all shapes and the back of a camel can be weak and it’s toast and surely there’s something behind it that I should seek out but I don’t even care. It’s my own face that obscures the face of God. 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 what it is.1 A blasphemer.

I can’t leave crowds for mountaintop, daily blur for Walden Pond—but there’s always the possibility of the singular vision. I remember: Contemplative simplicity isn’t a matter of circumstances; it’s a matter of focus.

The sun spreads out across the table, a cloth, and sunflowers ring light. I see it. All the world is window. No material is opaque. If we are willing to see—people, circumstances, situations, relationships—all is transparent. All of this globe is but glass to God.

Why am I a habitual reductionist? Why do I reduce God in this moment to mere annoying frustration? Why do I reduce The Greatest to the lesser instead of seeing the lesser, this mess, as reflecting The Greatest? I have to learn how to see, to look through to the Largeness behind all the smallness. Isn’t He here?

Gratitude redeems, making us the realists. Mouth thanks to the heights and see the real reality. Give thanks to keep the gaze on heaven. Glass to God.

Why do I lunge for control instead of joy? Is it somehow more perversely satisfying to flex control’s muscle? Ah—power—like Satan. Do I think Jesus-grace too impotent to give me the full life? Isn’t that the only reason I don’t always swill the joy?

I am praying with the eyes wide open and prayer becomes revelation. My eyes change and he changes in them and I remember, as G. K. Chesterton observes, how “our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again.”

“The practice of giving thanks … eucharisteo … this is the way we practice the presence of God, stay present to His presence, and it is always a practice of the eyes. We don’t have to change what we see. Only the way we see.”

“Feel thanks and it’s absolutely impossible to feel angry. We can only experience one emotion at a time. And we get to choose—which emotion do we want to feel?”

My mama, valley wise and grief traveled, she always said, “Expectations kill relationships.” And I’ve known expectations as a disease, silent killer heaping her burdens on the shoulders of a relationship until a soul bursts a pulmonary and dies. Expectations kill relationships—especially with God. And that’s what a child doesn’t have: this whole edifice of expectation. Without expectations, what can topple the surprising wonder of the moment?