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by
Ann Voskamp
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March 17 - May 14, 2022
that I’m somehow seen and known and safe.
We may think we know what we want, but what we really want is to be known. Heard. Seen. Safe.
The dream isn’t ever truly about experiencing miraculous things, but about the experience of feeling miraculously known.
Life comes in waves, and the way to live is to find a way to ride waves.
She may have been trying to tell me: Detours are the way dreams and destinies actually come true.
destination where we are ultimately seen, safe, soothed, and secure.
It’s when we expect life to be easy that it becomes hard. Buy the lie that your life is supposed to be heaven on earth, and suffering can be a torturous hell. But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven.
Suffering doesn’t mean you’re cursed; suffering means you’re human. The question isn’t “Why is there suffering in my life?” but “Why wouldn’t there be suffering?” Because such is life in a broken world. The question is “What way will you bear your suffering?”
have had our own EPS—an internal Expectational Positioning System—with
with expectations of where we think we should be by now on the road, of where the road is supposed to go, expectations of how we’d be loved, of how long we’d all have together, of the way everything is expected to work out in the end.
Strange, how you cannot feel content in your heart whenever it feels like someone else is ahead of you.
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.
Whatever road we expect to be on, the way we want most to find—is a way to be wanted and not left alone.
We aren’t here to live up to each other’s expectations. We are here to live with each other, be for each other. (Who
Where are you going with your life? Where is your soul on the way? Where you are—is this truly where you want to be?
He’s asking me to seek out and coordinate my own heart with His. The disappointments and disillusions, the dreams and desperate hopes, these are already known to an all-knowing God. 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.
When you hide who you are, what you ultimately are hiding from is yourself.
God’s first known question of history asks you to orient to the topography of intimacy, to locate yourself in the Landscape of Love.
The way through is to simply let the WayMaker
hold you close and let Him lead the way. Into Your hands I commit this. Trust is only hard if you don’t trust Love Himself holding you.
SACRED way, and end the day examining my own soul because if you end your day without a soul examination, you can end up soul sick, which is to say: If you get into bed at night without cutting your fears down to size, you get into bed with the devil. So I keep returning to it every night, to what Jesus asked His disciples to examine in their own hearts, out in the middle of a storm: “Why are you so afraid?” (Mark 4:40).
No question may matter more. Because if we let fears surge in the mind, they’ll turn the needles of the heart, if our lips never speak those fears out loud—the fears remain slippery, morph large in the dark, turning our hearts away from Love Himself.
Jesus asks us to examine why we are so afraid because He knows: Fears can turn and burn our hearts so they ignite fight-or-flight responses, making our fears masquerade like anger, like control, like perfectionism, like procrastination, like self-harm, like a thousand other masked faces.
Fear is about losing what we love. As Augustine wrote: “Fear startles at things . . . which endangers things beloved.”2
Wherever one is afraid, one is afraid of losing what one loves. As Augustine also pointed out, “We fear nothing save to lose what we love.”3 Our deepest loves drive our deepest fears.
You are deeply safe to ache with me, you are fully free to grieve with me, you are wholly seen and known, as you truly are, by me, and together we will hold space to hold deep pain in one hand, and the real grace in the other, because this is what it means to be wholeheartedly human. And in the middle of the trauma of this brokenhearted hallelujah, know too: You are a constellation we were always looking for. You are a shore we had to find. You are a wonder, an unexpected answer to how many years of lost echoes.
And yet, especially then, don’t doubt that the WayMaker makes wrong ways right. This is the work of a good and kind God.
“Like the marriage and adoption that it actually is.”
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! God is Lawgiver, and God is Lover!
We are saved by God’s covenantal hesed, for covenantal hesed back to God. Saved by the faithful fidelity of Christ alone means those who are saved respond with a faithful fidelity to Christ alone.
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. If there’s a deep disconnect in the church between what we believe and how we actually live, is it because we’ve forgotten the way to live actually and intimately connected to God? Our walk will only match our talk when we live attached to His heart.
“Adoption through propitiation,”
Love’s covenant to you moved Him to sign the contract with His blood at the cross to make you His own because what He ultimately came for was intimate communion with you.
What our brokenness ultimately
needs are withness and witness.
Jesus is my salvation, my destination, my direction, my orientation, my shelter, my home, my way, my Lord, my Lover, my King, my Life.
The triune God who is King of the universe also calls Himself our Father, Husband, Lover, Brother because our greatest fear is abandonment, and our greatest need is attachment, and God enfolds our every breath:
Atonement is for attachment. The very reason God forgives us is to give us kinship. Salvation doesn’t just save us from our life of sin; salvation is saving us for life with God. Kin. He sheds His blood to share His life with us. Saved from sin, saved for communion. Kin.
The cry of Jesus on the cross was a cry for communion. It’s seen in the stretching arms of Jesus on the cross, seen in the cry of every cross worn and clung to down through the ages: The gospel is more than just escape; the gospel is embrace. Kin with the King.
wherever we go, He goes, and wherever He goes, we go, and as long as nothing gets in the way of us being together, everything on the way is going to be okay.
God always comes the whole way through for us, to be with us.
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, and I’ll be the One who loves you to death and back to the fullest life, to make you Mine, kin, for forever.
ESV). And the Hebrew words for serve and worship used throughout Exodus 7 are the linguistically related words abad and avodah, which mean “keep in bondage, be bondmen, bond-service.”*
The WayMaker’s saying, “Let My people go—so they will fuse to Me. Worship Me. Be bound to Me.” The WayMaker doesn’t make a way for us to go our own way. The WayMaker’s saying, “Let My people go—so they
will attach to Me.” The WayMaker’s calling us out of bondage—avadim—to Pharaoh—to bondage, ...
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but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully
every human turned and curved inward toward oneself.1 It’s what all the limping and bent saints who have come before have said of the curved journey—Augustine, Luther, Barth, Lewis. Incurvatus in se curves us away from the heart of God—until our attachment ultimately breaks and our own hearts break.
Keep burying how you feel and you’ll end up digging your relationships a pretty big grave. If you don’t speak your fears and questions aloud, they only grow louder in your soul.
When your world slides off base, you have a base. When your world needs to feel safe, you have a haven. When your world feels rocky, I’ll be your cleft in the rock. Closeness. Craving presence. Cruciform reach. Cleft in the rock.
