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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ann Voskamp
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August 28 - September 6, 2023
Life is never made unbearable by the road itself but by the way we bear the road. It’s not the hard roads that slay us; what actually slays us is the expectation that this road isn’t what we hoped it to be.
He asks you where you are in your life because He wants you to name the place, see the place, acknowledge it, sit with it—even befriend it.
Ayekah means God understands everything going on inside and doesn’t want a soul to hide. Not to hide from the feelings, not to hide from the hoping, not to hide from the dreaming, not to hide from the grieving.
When you hide who you are, what you ultimately are hiding from is yourself. This is a haunting, exhausting kind of lost. And if evil can keep you distracted from taking the time to ask your soul where you really are, he can take you every day further from the life you envisioned.
When we find the courage to be transparent, we find ourselves found. Only when you ask where you are every day can you find your way. The God who asks where you are, He’s large enough to hold you—however, wherever, you are.
Ayekah, on the other hand, expresses a heart motivation beyond mere location, and ayekah conveys expectations: “Where have you gone? Where are you if you are not here with me?”
Prayer isn’t giving God information to act upon but God giving us intimacy to rest in.
You can say there is suffering only if you believe there is a God.5 If there is no God, there can’t be suffering, only life and the harsh reality of survival of the fittest. To believe there is suffering implies there is injustice. But if you believe there is no God, there can’t be any injustice; there can only be pain and the natural outcome of natural selection. But if you believe there truly is unjust suffering, if you believe that babies shouldn’t die and diagnoses shouldn’t devour dreams and violence shouldn’t violate hopes, your very conscience is appealing to a higher moral law.
How else do you explain the indignation over the wrongness of suffering, except that the indignation itself seems to explain that you know there is rightly supposed to be more?
God speaks the Way (1) through communion, (2) through circumstances, (3) through counsel, (4) through conviction. And not one of the ways He communicates can ever contradict what His Holy Word’s already communicated.
Until there’s a release and a turning from your way, there is no going God’s way. Press the ear to the seashell, and hear it: If the way you’re walking doesn’t have crosses, afflictions, persecutions, and self-denial, you’re not on Christ’s way. His ways are waves, and ours the shore, always resisting. Our way is self-formed, God’s way is cruciform; our way is wide and self-comforting, His way is narrow and self-denying; and our way rarely crosses His, as His way always means a carrying of a cross.
Dried up bushes of faith can kindle into an inferno of presence.
I think I see a sliver I had never imagined: Jesus knows turns you never heard of, makes roads you wouldn’t have dreamed of, makes miracles happen exactly where you never would have imagined. There is a reason He is called the Way. There is more beyond what we can see, feel, imagine, and there is always dry land ahead. There is always a Red Sea Road coming to meet you. In unlikely ways. Waves may heave, but you have to believe: Love always finds His way to you.
The only way a heart can ever be unafraid and untroubled is for it to be undivided. Why beg God to divide seas for me if my heart for Him is divided? Why expect that God will split waters for me if I’m just giving Him my split attention? Why do I expect God to make a way if I’m often going my own way?
Peace is a Person, not a place. Peace isn’t found in a place on a map, or in a place in our imagination or dreams, or in arriving at any place in the cosmos—it’s only found in a deep attachment to the Person of Christ. Peace isn’t found in any present, peaceful circumstances but in the presence of Christ. Peace isn’t getting somewhere but in giving your life to Someone.
Habits (or lack thereof) change where we arrive. Rhythms build roads; lack of rhythms leaves us lost. Small daily turns decide destination, and we only have one life. I’d read, and think often, how originally a habit meant a piece of clothing that we inhabit, pull on, live in. As nuns dress in habits to express their devotion to God, so habits, like clothing, reveal our own kinds of devotion. More than something we do, habits make us who we are. Habits are uniforms that reveal identity; change your habits and you change who you are. All pilgrims wear their habits, every WayFarer wears a way of
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But in practicing the SACRED way, and the daily habit of asking my soul what Jesus asks—“Why are you so afraid?”—I think, examining under all the layers, that maybe at the core: Fear is love of self. Jesus asks us to explore what we are so afraid of so we can see what we love more than Him.
What people label, God loves, and who gets written off, God writes their names on the palms of His hands, and when we fall way too far short of being enough, God makes the way to move into us and be our home. God knows all of us are but dust, but look what God does with dirt, and He makes a way for dust to resurrect and breathe for all time and eternity. No, there is no shame: All you can feel is tender toward all the brave who refuse to surrender to the dark but keep rising until their lungs’ last rising.
“Well, I wonder if it’s because we’ve got the metaphors of our reality turned around. Seems to me that the main metaphor that’s become our map for understanding who and where we are in relation to God is legal, judiciary, God primarily as judge,” which is to rightly say: Relational wrongs have been done, heartbreaking sins have been committed, and a Holy God rightly requires justice.
“This is truth—and, yet, there is truly more to the story. If your only biblical metaphor for the reality of the gospel is that your wrongs have brought you into court before a Holy God, who pays the price and makes things right when you exit that court of law? You may not know that the way forward, the way of Jesus, is to live in intimate communion with God.”
Marriage and adoption have legal implications, but they are more than only a legal reality. Marriage and adoption are meant to be a lived reality, a lived attachment, a communion reality—a love story!
If we chain our image of God up in only a courtroom, we’ll never experience how He courts us with lovingkindness, frees us from aloneness for oneness, drops all the sentences against us to write us into a saving love story, line after tender line. If we only know God as the holy Judge and right-making King who sacrificed and saved us, we may give Him love for all of that. But if we intimately know Him as the ultimate Lover, Father, Husband, Brother, who is the King and Judge who sacrificed and saved us, we may love Him with all that we are.
What the WayMaker is always making a way to is a way of life with Him. What our brokenness ultimately needs are withness and witness. No way is wrong if it’s with Him and every way is good if it’s in Him.
What God is saying, when He cuts the covenant as the smoking firepot in Genesis 15 with Abram, when He cuts the Red Sea for the people of Israel, when He cuts the temple veil because of His sacrifice at the cross for us right now, is nothing less than: Not only will I cut myself off if I don’t keep My covenant of hesed-love to you forever; I will pay the penalty and let Myself be cut open if you can’t keep your love covenant to Me. Even when you fail and fall and all the dreams and hopes fracture, and you don’t and can’t keep your covenant of hesed-love, I’ll keep the whole covenant for you,
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What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.5
Gethsemanes are places of intimacy. At every crossroad the call is to remember the direction of the Way Himself whom we follow, and He always carries a cross and is going the way of suffering toward a place of dying. Why expect another trajectory when you’re following Him? Cruciform is always the healing trajectory of intimacy. The Suffering Savior wants nothing less than to be with us, and suffering is the way He is for us, near us, and in us. If you want the WayMaker to make a way, know that His way always runs through suffering; He has no other way. Not because He doesn’t love us but
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God isn’t transactional, making deals with us of no pain in exchange for faithful love; God is relational, making the way to be with us through pain because He is faithful Love. God doesn’t keep us from suffering; He keeps us through it. “Every detail of your body and soul—even the hairs of your head!—is in my care; nothing of you will be lost. Staying with it—that’s what is required. Stay with it to the end. You won’t be sorry; you’ll be saved.” (Luke 21:17–19 MSG)
