Ann Voskamp Quotes

This. I live in this place, make porridge, scrub toilets, do laundry, and for days, weeks, I am brave and I do get out of bed and I think on this. I study this, the full life, the being fully ready for the end. I start to think that maybe there is a way out of nightmares to dreams? Maybe?
Ann Voskamp
Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash
Ann Voskamp
Jesus embraced His not enough ... He gives thanks ... and there is more than enough. More than enough. Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle. And who doesn't need a miracle like that everyday? Thanksgiving makes time. The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving creates abundance; and he miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks - ...it's giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough. I am thank-full. I am time-full. page 72
Ann Voskamp
Daily discipline is the door to full freedom, and the discipline to count to one thousand gave way to the freedom of wonder and I can't imagine not staying awake to God in the moment, the joy in the now.
Ann Voskamp
When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
Ann Voskamp
Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on.
Ann Voskamp
Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held.
Ann Voskamp
All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no.
Ann Voskamp
Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.
Ann Voskamp
So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait. Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas.
Ann Voskamp
Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.
Ann Voskamp
But the irony: Don't I often want to desperately wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness--I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image?
Ann Voskamp
I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify.
Ann Voskamp
I am blessed. I can bless.
Ann Voskamp
When it gets dark, it's only because god has tucked me in a cleft of the rock and covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I'm falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams.But maybe this is true reality: It is in the dark that God is passing by. the bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can't see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us, I-beam supporting in earthquake.
Ann Voskamp
God holds us in the untamed moments too.
Ann Voskamp
Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn't know how there is ever going to be enough?How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up?A morning in late November, joy shimmers.The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do....count blessings and discover who can be counted on.
Ann Voskamp
When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, 'whenever man is made the centre of things, he becomes the storm-centre of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains... You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause.'When the laundry is for the dozen arms of children or the dozen legs, it's true, I think I'm due some appreciation. So comes a storm of trouble and lightning strikes joy. But when Christ is center, when dishes, laundry, work, is my song of thanks to Him, joy rains. Passionately serving Christ alone makes us the loving servant to all. When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone - the bones, they sing joy, and the work returns to it's purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness.
Ann Voskamp
The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving.
Ann Voskamp
God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
Ann Voskamp
I make soup and I back bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can't experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn't that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes? The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything. If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?
Ann Voskamp
I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain...again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless.
Ann Voskamp
Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie. I draw all the hurting voices close and I tough their scars with a whisper: sometimes we don't fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good - until we have the perspective of years.In time, years, dust settles.In memory, ages, God emerges.
Ann Voskamp
Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end.
Ann Voskamp
Eucharisteo means 'to give thanks,' and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received. I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift! I could be the joy!
Ann Voskamp
Why do I lunge for control instead of joy?...do I thin Jesus grace too impotent to give me the full life...Whenever I am blind to joys well, isn't it because I don't believe in Gods care? P 130
Ann Voskamp
I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?
Ann Voskamp
Sometimes, too often, I don't want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier.
Ann Voskamp
When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, "whenever man is made the center of things, he becomes the storm-center of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains...You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause... When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone - the bones, they sing joy and the work returns to it's purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness. "The work we do is only our love for Jesus in action" writes Mother Theresa. "If we pray the work...if we do it to Jesus, if we do it for Jesus, if we do it with Jesus... that's what makes us content." Deep joy is always in the touching of Christ - in whatever skin He comes to us in. Page 194
Ann Voskamp
Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
Ann Voskamp
Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don't see God, I'll bow down before something else.
Ann Voskamp
Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.
Ann Voskamp
Hurry always empties a soul.
Ann Voskamp
...this counting blessings was the unlocking of the mystery of joy, joy, "the gigantic secret of the Christian," joy hiding in gratitude ... God had used the dare to give me this; led me all he way to give me this, live fully, fully live. Page 83
Ann Voskamp
If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude
Ann Voskamp
Thanksgiving creates abundance.
Ann Voskamp
Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.
Ann Voskamp
Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.
Ann Voskamp
Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.
Ann Voskamp
Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.
Ann Voskamp
Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.
Ann Voskamp
And it's the 'Word of God' that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, 'that makes the eyes see', the body full of light.
Ann Voskamp
I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ and 'everything is eucharisteo'.
Ann Voskamp
Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.
Ann Voskamp
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?
Ann Voskamp
The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?
Ann Voskamp
The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.
Ann Voskamp
Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love?
Ann Voskamp
That is what a shadow is, and empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is this - a hole in the goodness of God.
Ann Voskamp
When we lay the soil of our hard lives opened the rain of grace and let Joy permeate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? for us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks. p. 58
Ann Voskamp
I speak the unseen into seeing and I can feel it, this steady breathing in the rhythm of grace--'give thanks (in), give thanks (out)'.
Ann Voskamp
We 'have' all received on grace after another, but we only recognize the glory of God in this moment 'when we wake to the one grace after another'.
Ann Voskamp
Here I can become the blessing, a little life that multiplies joy, making the larger world a better place.God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
Ann Voskamp
Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an e. Ann, a trio of curves and lines.It means “full of grace”.
Ann Voskamp
Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering the converse does. The brave who focus and all things good and all things beautiful to give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agent to bring the fullest night to all the world.
Ann Voskamp
With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too ... If the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, and our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.To see through to God.That which tears open our souls, those holes which splatter sight, they actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart aching beauty beyond. To him. To the god whom we endlessly crave.But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing through to collect places? How do I give up resentment for gratitude, anger for spilling joy, so focus for God communion. To fully live to fully live grace enjoy with all that is beauty internal it is possible
Ann Voskamp
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.
Ann Voskamp
The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.
Ann Voskamp
To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? ... We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselves... when we find Him.
Ann Voskamp
How to 'live' in a state of awe when life is mundane and ordinary?
Ann Voskamp