Ann Voskamp Quotations

I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

Really good writing, from my perspective, runs a lot like a visual on the screen. You need to create that kind of detail and have credibility with the reader, so the reader knows that you were really there, that you really experienced it, that you know the details. That comes out of seeing.

Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But it's even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul.

In a storm of struggles, I have tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But stress can be an addiction, and worry can be our lunge for control, and we forget the answer to this moment is always yes because of Christ.

By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.

Romance isn't measured by how viral your proposal goes. The Internet age may try to sell you something different, but don't ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness - so don't ever make being viral your goal.

When we can't bottle our tears up anymore, God catches every one in His bottle. God's catching every falling tear because He won't let us fall apart.

The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest light to all the world.

Gratitude's not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I've spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.

My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they'd read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.

A simplified Christmas isn't about circumstances as much as it is about focus.

I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.

Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.

Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small - but we aren't sizes. We are souls. There are no better people or worse people - there are only God-made souls.

Get this, kids - how a man proposes isn't what makes him romantic. It's how a man purposes to lay down his life that makes him romantic.

Scales always lie. They don't make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.

Counting one thousand gifts, I discovered I could count on God.

The real romantics imagine greying and sagging and wrinkling as the deepening of something sacred.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.

I came into this world the way every person on the planet does - with clenched fists.

If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough.

The real romantics are the boring ones - they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs.

I'm not a fast writer at all. I come empty and wait upon the Lord. So it really is all a waiting process, a patient process.

Our [people's] very saving is associated with our gratitude. Which follows: if our fall in the garden was ingratitude, then salvation must be intimately related to giving of thanks.

I don't think of myself as an author. But simply as a grateful child of God. John 3:27 has long been a life verse: "A man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven." Any more words will only be solely a gift from Him. I can only faithfully wait.

Going ahead in the midst of the stressful circumstances and giving thanks in that moment - you can't simultaneously feel stress and gratitude at the same time. So as a parent, to go ahead and start to give thanks to God resets the whole family.

Research actually indicates that if you write down what you're grateful for, it increases your happiness by 25%. And who doesn't want that? And God's word says (1 Thessalonians 5), "Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." Who doesn't want to know exactly what God's will is for them?

Simplicity is never a matter of circumstances; simplicity is a matter of focus. So in the midst of educating and parenting our children, we can't necessarily go ahead and make everything fit into neat, controllable, simple schedules. But the point is, simplicity is: how do we keep our eyes fixed and focused on Christ, no matter where we are?

This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.

More important than a clean house is a close family.

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But its even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul.

In naming that which is right before me, that which I'd otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.

...life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.

Love comes softly, it cannot be forced...cannot bear the weight of our expectations. Love always comes in the surrender - in the falling.

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.

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.

We're called to do more than believe in God, we're called to live in God.

Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.

Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things

How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.

Worry is belief gone wrong. Because you don't believe that God will get it right. But peace - peace is belief that exhales. Because you believe that God's provision is everywhere - like air.

I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.

God lays down all of His fullness into all the emptiness. I am in Him. He is in me. I embrace God in the moment. I give Him thanks and I bless God and we meet and couldn't I make love to God, making every moment love for Him? "To know Him the way Adam knew Eve. Spirit skin to spirit skin.

Isn't falling in love always the fullest life?

When the heart and mind focus on things unseen - that's when there's a visible change in us.

We all get to choose where we set up the stage of our lives - before the Crowds, the Court, the Congregation, the Critics (inner or otherwise)-- or the Cross of Christ. All except One will assess your performance. Only One will accept you before your performance ... Only in Jesus is there 100% acceptance before even 1% performance.

Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?

I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.

He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).

I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.

All God makes is good. Can it be that that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God?

Poor communication doesn’t disconnect souls. It’s the disconnected souls who poorly communicate.

God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors.

Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave. Isn’t that the catalyst of all my sins? 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.

If I had the perspective of the whole, perhaps I'd see it? That which seems evil, is it a cloud to bring rain, to bring a greater good to the whole of the world? Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?

Satan's sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully ungrateful for what God gave.

It’s impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fear

Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace, empty transfigures into full. God wastes nothing – ‘makes everything work out according to his plan.’ (Ephesians 1:11).

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

Every breath is a battle between grudgery and gratitude. Give thanks...and you win joy.

The life that counts blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.

A lack of doxology leads to depravity.

When you're most wounded by words run to the only Word that always brings healing.

The Word God wastes nothing and He heals two broken hearts with one story - the reader and the writer.

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?

Every mountain that every Christian ever faces, the Lord levels with sufficient grace.

I want a life that makes music - not just practices the piano.

Parenting is about preparing children to get along with each other, to get along with you and without you, and that it's impossible to get along without God.

God is always good and we are always loved... even when what He gives may appear ugly.

I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things . Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.

I glance back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I've boldly driven straight across without second thought, and I see truth reflecting back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren't I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don't believe? But if I'm grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my beliefs and I trust Him again.

The gift list is thinking upon His goodness – and this, this pleases Him most! And most profits my own soul and I am beginning, only beginning, to know it. If clinging to His goodness is the highest form of prayer, then this seeing His goodness with a pen, with a shutter, with a word of thanks, these really are the most sacred acts conceivable. The ones anyone can conceive, anywhere, in the midst of anything. Eucharisteo takes us into His love.

Life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips.

Grace is alive, living waters. If I dam up the grace, hold the blessings tight, joy within dies... waters that have no life.

Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will.

How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can't I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy- and seeing shows the way in.

Christian hands never clasp and He doesn't give gifts for gain because a gift can never stop being a gift - it is always meant to be given.

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.

The busyness of your life leaves little room for the source of your life.

Remembering with thanks is what causes us to trust - to really believe.

The bravest love is wildly faithful and it falls hard again every morning... It knows what we seek may be found in what we already have... it's grace and fresh gratitude that can make us strong enough to marvel in the seeming monotony of anything... And the happily married have eyes that look long enough to make the familiar new.

Joy is always a function of gratitude - and gratitude is always a function of perspective.

Where ever you are be all there

Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held.

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.

But wells don't come without first begging to see the wells; wells don't come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There's no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping.

Manna today or I starve.

The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.

Are stress and worry evidence of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God?

They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... God gives us time. And who has time for God? Which makes no sense.

God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.