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

by Ann Voskamp

Someone to rock us safe. Is this why Scripture paints the two metaphors that most fully express our relationship with God as Father, close parent, and as Lover, covenantal partner—because both are about being held, both are about dependence, both are about intimate emotional

Marriages drift not because there is increasing conflict and anger but because there is increasing distance and decreasing attachment.

Traumas can bend us away from reaching for, or trust taking, any comfort from anyone. Nobody tells you that the shields you throw up to protect your heart end up being more like a prison that leaves you alone.

Sharing the weight of your feelings with another soul regulates your feelings, bringing balance to your soul.

so I don’t begin my day quietly in the Word, gazing upon the face of my Beloved who never made a child He thinks is too much.

SACRED spiritual disciplines of stillness, attentiveness, cruciformity, revelation, examine, and doxology slip as priorities,

Life is about distance, in relation to God, and living constantly in the direction of God. No measurement in the world matters but the distance between us and God.

my heart takes the way of incurvatus in se, this curving in toward self—self-sufficiency, self-protection, self-comfort, self-interest. It’s the bent way of being human: We’re wired for attachment, for dependence on God, but our inclination toward incurvatus in se turns the direction of our dependence toward destructive things, and our attachments go awry. All addiction is an attachment in the wrong direction. Name your pain, name the way you try to make the pain go away, and you name your addiction. Name your default direction.

At the heart of all kind of addictions is a broken attachment that left a broken heart.9 The food addict, the screen addict, the game addict, the pill addict, the bottle addict, the porn addict, the gambling addict, the person addict, the shopping addict, the comfort addict—all the addicts carry a hurt in the wrong direction,

Bonding or bondage, those are always the two ways to choose in every moment.

“To forsake God and to exist in oneself—that is, to be pleased with oneself—is not immediately to lose all being; but it is to come closer to nothingness.”

How and whom we trust is what changes us.

What if I am never loved the way I want to be loved? What if I die never having been loved the way I dreamed? Is there really

anyone who is literally taking care of us, or is all this metaphor, and who is truly taking care of me if not me?

They didn’t trust God to take care of them. What broke God’s heart was that the Israelites didn’t trust God to take care of their hearts. They didn’t trust the God who took care of them once and brought them through to take care of them and bring them through to His safe arms again.

The word translated trust from the Hebrew, batach, literally means “to cling or adhere to something”—or attach to someone.

I’ll cling to my comfort of choice instead.

Murmuring is stopping to rail against God, which is the antithesis of stilling, which is slowing and paying attention to God, and where our soul is in relation to Him.

Self-care is not the same as resting in God’s care.

When we try to take care of ourselves, we can take away the care God means to give.

When I don’t fully expect hesed, I can fully expect I’ve made my own kind of barren desert way.

“There are only two kinds of people in the end,” wrote C. S. Lewis: “those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”

Every single temptation I’ve ever known to take my own way has spoken the language of entitlement. My entitlement—or God’s enthronement. Living feeling entitled to a story—or entrusting the story to God. And if I don’t trust God enough to form a deep attachment to God, I get lost and turn to trust all kinds of other things with my needs, and those attachments can grow into craving addictions because they can’t deeply satisfy.

All our addictions are wrongly directed attachments, and all addictions are healed with rightly directed attachments.

Relationship is the only rewarding reality that lasts for all eternity. The way through is always about moving in the direction of connection.

Suffering can be the friend who drives you where you didn’t know you needed to go. I dare to believe: Life’s detours and deconstructions mean God wants you to run right into His arms so He can reconstruct your heart.

Suffering is not our main stress. Estrangement is.

Sin is putting things in the way of the WayMaker coming to me, and letting things get in the way of me going to Him. Ultimately sin is our way of keeping God away. More than the stress of any suffering, sin that keeps us estranged from God is the cause of our deepest distress.

The place we are all ultimately seeking a way out of is aloneness.

“Seeing God’s greatness is not our deepest need, but seeing His goodness,”

To take your days and find ways to say to Love Himself who made you, “I love You too.”

Expect nothing but the hesed-lovingkindness of God here—and accept everything here is a way to love Him back. You were born for this SACRED romance. Before

I don’t really trust Your ways—don’t trust Your ways to take care of me, don’t trust Your ways to grow my joy large because Your ways aren’t just higher than ours; sometimes Your

The soul’s greatest lack is lacking confidence in God.

The prodigal has a plan to take things into his own hands—and the father only wants to take the son into his arms. Hesed holds.

The Way Himself finds us. The Way found me. The only One who is the Way, the only One who can find the way, the only One who can make the way, can be trusted to make the best way.

“My heart is always tied to your heart.”

My addiction is me.

Nothing destroys a life like idolatry. Nothing destabilizes a life like centering self.

The only way out and through is to enter into the sufferings of Christ. Only the One who keeps His covenant to suffer with you can carry you the whole way through.

Instead of gazing on the beauty of God Himself, we’ve all kept gazing on a way, a dream of another life without suffering that we’ve made into some kind of god to us.

Each of us has curved our own way and away from God, rejecting His ways through suffering, His way of wooing us through heartbreak, His way of taking care of us through everything, when it’s only His way that will make the most fulfilling way.

God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely

Real Christians are actually those who turn, faithful followers who keep turning and turning, to be the faithful trusters. Christianity is never only the mental assent of faith in Jesus, without requiring the lived attachment, trusting faithfulness to Jesus.

How often do we want God to divide some Red Sea for us, yet we are the ones with a divided heart?

“Love the Lord your God with all your very, very much.”

Your muchness may make you feel like not enough, but your muchness is your strength.

being: If you don’t set yourself apart for a SACRED way with God, you set out to tear your own life apart. Where there is a divided heart, the waters will not part.

just keep cling-trusting the WayMaker and a daily SACRED way of life to grow

deeper attachment to God because it is turning again and again toward healthy attachments that heal harmful addictions.