WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

by Ann Voskamp

I just need the script running in my head to say I’m wanted, that I won’t be abandoned, that I’m somehow seen and known and safe.

For right on and thatt. Snus is so

Like the moon, our dreams, our loves, our hopes wax and wane, ebb and flow, rise and fall. Life comes in waves, and the way to live is to find a way to ride waves.

Doubtful. She may have been trying to tell me: Detours are the way dreams and destinies actually come true.

destiny we all ultimately dream of is a destination where we are ultimately seen,

nightmares of loss and tragedy and grief can still become an unexpected awakening to tender dreams, if there are ways—even in the dark places—to be seen and known, safe and secure. Dreams are brave laughter that lingers long into the night, hands finding ours, warming light finding our faces—and the possibility of being known even here grows our hearts achingly large. Wherever we are always acce...

But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven.

Whenever

you measure the seeming distance between where you are and where someone else is, discontent fits into your soul. Measuring sticks are self-harming. Comparison is soul-maiming. And likening your journey to anyone else’s is a way to hate your own soul. I still bear tender scars. “We’re almost

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 are all created out of intimacy, for intimacy.

He’s asking me to seek out and coordinate my own heart with His.

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. Like Adam and Eve, the temptation is to flee. To cover

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?”

was asking, “Where are you in relation to Me? Where have you gone that’s taken you further away from Me? Where are you when the expectation is that you and I would always be together?” God cries because there is distance between Him and His lover,

Because our fall was detachment from God, our restoration is found only in attachment to God.

You can turn the sail to fill with the wind of the Spirit, you can move forward in the current of His love, you can reroute through waves. Turn your sail toward the Spirit, and it turns out you can get out of the boat and walk on waves right back to Him.

Love lives at peace with pain, and the two will never divorce. Because to love is to be tender enough to know suffering, to be vulnerable enough to know hurt, and the only way to divorce your way from any pain is to divorce yourself from any love. The way to love always knows roads of pain—because there is no other way to ever know love. I let his hand hold

trust that you’re chosen by someone good, you can trust that you’re always being taken to good places. The chosen are simply the ones approached by an enamored God who can’t stop thinking about you. This is worth

I’d

forget how long it took for me to realize it: When you find yourself on a way you wouldn’t choose, and can’t change, choosing to believe that you’re still chosen for a good way is the only way through.

We want things to go the way we choose—and God wants us to choose to trust His ways. We expect more—and God expects us to trust Him more. The ways God chooses for His chosen are ways that beg us to choose trust. It’s impossible for us to please God unless we trust God with the impossible (Hebrews 11:6). There is no pleasing God without trusting

Trusting God is no small thing: To God, it is everything. God wants to be chosen too. I turn to look

It can look like we are lost on the way—but if we are with Someone who loves us, we are never lost.

But the hesed-love of the Lord chooses you because He can’t not choose to be with you. Chosenness isn’t about a life of perfectness but a life of withness. It’s true that the lines of His holy love letter to us often translate hesed as “lovingkindness,” a word literally invented in an attempt to translate the all-encompassing Hebrew word hesed,* but “loving-kindness” apparently doesn’t fully convey how hesed is an entirely different stratosphere of love. Used nearly 250 times in Scripture, in such a powerful manner that some theologians have suggested it may be the most important word in Scripture,1 hesed is the forever covenantal, always unconditionally, unwaveringly loyal, kind love of inseparable bonding,

Himself to you. You are not merely endured, you are not hardly tolerated, you are not barely accepted—but you—your very being, your actual presence, your whole soul, all of the miracle that is you is wanted—picked, chosen, delighted in, special—simply because your lungs expand to take in His love and exhale with love, the kiss of existence. God wants to inhale you, move with you, curl like kindness around your every thought. Believing this is to be really living.

I don’t feel it, I am Father-held, His everlasting arms around all my needs, and Someone’s not gonna save me by being a genie in a bottle who’s gonna make all my dreams come true, not gonna save me by wish fulfillment or carrying me off into some sunset—Someone’s gonna save me by tenderly attaching His heart to mine like a fusing. Salvation by hesed.* “But I have trusted in your steadfast [hesed-love]; / my heart shall rejoice in your salvation”

that longs to be found. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world,”4 wrote Lewis. From the beginning,

almost. If we find ourselves with a passion to be loved that can’t be fully satisfied by anything in this world, the most probable explanation is that we are made for another otherworldly love.

the Trinity is what drives your commitment to an encircling love that has no end. All I can tell you is what I know now: Love is more than an emotion; love is commitment set in motion. I never got a chance to tell Grandma: God is love, but if we get it turned around, and make being loved into our god, we get lost in self. Death of self is always the pulse that keeps love alive. From the beginning, one man and one woman leave their worlds and cleave to one another in a constellation of oneness, and a marriage becomes a metaphor of more.

Out of wreckage can come resurrection. There always has to be a dying for there to be loving.

triune God came for more than making us right with Him. He came to make us one with Him. He came for more than cleaning us up and making us right. He came to marry us and make us His. He came

want. He came to make a way for us to want Him most.

and if you expect another human to find a way to fill you, you will lose your way. Expect another human being to fill all your emptiness, and you can expect to divorce yourself

Expecting another human being to fill up your senses, like the glorious awe of a lapping vast ocean or a raincloud breaking over desert, doesn’t ultimately make any sense—because a mere human can’t fill up our senses like God. Mountains in early May only fill up our senses because what is filling them is the glory of God. Longing for our senses to fill up like a dark night in the deep woods is longing for more than love—it’s longing for Love Himself.14 What we’re all looking for is a way to look into the eyes of One who is always looking for us, and there is only One.* And

down plans. Lay down agendas. Lay down self. Think of self less. Love is always the laying down. Love lets go of self—to hold on to the other. This is how to make love out of a marriage: Love lays down its own wants to lift up the will of another. Later,

Our marital union is a sculpted image, a symbol of the sacred intimacy God means to have with us. The great mystery is that the Mystery Himself wants to marry us, know us, love us, be one with us, that we would be in Christ and Christ in us.

There is a knowing that is information, and there is a knowing that is intimacy. There is a knowness that is an intellectual knowness of acknowledgment, and there is an intimate yada-knowness of attachment.

There is a knowing that is surface level, and there is a knowing that is skin to skin, soul to soul. He

That same word that’s used to express intimately knowing God, yada, is also the very same word that’s used to describe the intimacy of physical oneness.* To know your spouse, to “have relations” with them, is yada—and to have a relationship with God is nothing less than yada

Stand back from God, like He’s only some holy smoking mountain, and you can only know about this God. To know this God, you will have to stay close enough to touch Him. Close enough to touch, to trace every word, every line, from His Word, from His lips, to lean the whole weight of your world upon Him

Question and doubt, slam and smash, rail and flail with fury, but keep close enough to keep pounding His chest. Don’t ever withdraw enough that you don’t know Him, that you can’t draw His heart by heart because what’s hellish is: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only

Only those who obey and go the Way of God can say they know God. To know God like the back of your hand, your hands, your feet, your heart, you have to move with Him. To know God is to be so intimately attached to God that you move with God, and He moves through you. “Remember how the L

mine). To obey God is our way of laying out the welcome mat for God to come know all the chambers of our heart intimately, to know how our heart is for Him. Still, turn, sit, hunger, linger, long to intimately yada-know God’s heart, and let God yada-know all of your heart, and you explore the terrain of His heart, and He explores yours, and you find life isn’t about a way to a destination but about a way to travel, a way to be wholly known and still wholly loved.

Press on, pursue hard after Him who is coming for you like the warming dawn across your face every day, who falls on your upturned face and your every parched place like gentle, resurrecting rains, who guides your way to thriving, which only comes from intimately knowing all of Him.

As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us . . . All that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him.9

When God knocks and moves right in, dwells within, abides within, takes up residence and makes His home within, takes off His shoes, lights a candle, leans over and slips His arm around you, the Way has already found you, and you are home where you’re emotionally known and forever soul-safe. Why need a way to somewhere else when your interior world with the WayMaker is so lovely, so enfolded in a love where you are fully seen and deeply known and wholly safe, a world you can turn and return to, when there is nowhere else you want to be? “Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong”

When you yada-know the kindness of God, you can know there will be some kind of fruitfulness. Intimacy with God bears fruit for God. Intimate God-experience births God-obedience. Know the Way, and you know the Way.

You never know the way of love without knowing the way of suffering. The only way to avoid heartbreak is to grow so hard you become unbreakable.* The only way that’s completely pain-free is a way completely free of love.

Suffering is part of any road that any heart’s ever known, and trying to avoid suffering at all costs is what causes all kinds of unnecessary suffering. Whatever the story or form of suffering, it can be transformed into a restoration story. Suffering always happens on the way, and there is always a way through and out of the suffering because the Way Himself is with you, hand in yours, guiding you.