100+ Ann Voskamp Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - "Finding Joy in the Nitty-Gritty: An Interview with Ann Voskamp". "Homeschool Heartbeat" podcast with Mike Farris (Volume 127, Week 14), hslda.org. August 8-12, 2016.

Topics: Jesus, Grateful, Writing

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on 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.

Topics: Thanksgiving, Running, Song, Wild Roses, Heavy Rain

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

Topics: Believe, Believe In God

The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it’s supposed sophistication, it’s cynicism that’s simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks? The sages and prophets, the disciples and revolutionaries, they are the ones up on the ramparts, up on the wall pointing to the dawn of the new Kingdom coming, pointing to the light that breaks through all things broken, pointing to redemption always rising and to the Blazing God who never sleeps.

Topics: Wall, Sleep, Dark, Fallen World

Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.

Topics: Children, Motherhood, Soul, Sculpting

What was intended to harm, God intended it all for good. And no matter what intends to harm you, God's arms have you. You can never be undone.

Topics: Arms, Matter, Undone

On the night He was betrayed Jesus broke bread and lifted it up and gave THANKS. If Jesus can give thanks in that, can we not give thanks in all?

Topics: Jesus, Night, Giving

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

Topics: Heart, Focus, Mind

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.

source: - "How the Hidden Dangers of Comparison Are Killing Us ... (and Our Daughters): The Measuring Stick Principle" by Ann Voskamp, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 8, 2013.

Topics: Soul, Yardsticks, Beaten

Every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God?

Topics: Stress, Unreliability, Advertising

Girls rival each other. Women revive each other. Girls empale each other. Women empower each other. Girls compare each other. Women champion each other.

Topics: Girl, Empowering, Champion

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

Topics: Giving, Ugly, May

I think God calls us to small things, to faithfulness right where we are, to just do the next thing.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Thinking, Next, Faithfulness

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.151, Zondervan

Topics: Blessing, Bridges

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

source: - Twitter post from Jun 22, 2016

Topics: Running, Healing, Wounded

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2012). “One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces”, p.18, Zondervan

Topics: Fall, Giving, Firsts

Life isn't an emergency. Christ is in charge of every moment of the day; nothing catches Him off guard.

source: - "Finding Joy in the Nitty-Gritty: An Interview with Ann Voskamp". "Homeschool Heartbeat" podcast with Mike Farris (Volume 127, Week 14), www.hslda.org. August 8-12, 2016.

Topics: Emergencies, Moments, Christ

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.

Topics: Fall, Moon, Glasses, Pantheism, Snow Falling

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.15, Zondervan

Topics: Fall, Giving, Ungrateful, Ingratitude

God only allows pain if He’s allowing something new to be born.

source: - Twitter post from Aug 25, 2014

Topics: Pain, Something New, Born

Grace is the only thing that is ever enough.

Topics: Grace, Enough

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

source: - Ann Voskamp (2012). “One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces”, p.12, Zondervan

Topics: Blessing, Seems

No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.

Topics: Parenthood, Mothering, Hardest

Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love? That Satan's way is more powerful, more practical, more fulfilling in my daily life than Jesus' way? WHy else get angry? Isn't it because I think complaining, exasperation, resentment will pound me up into the full life I really want? When I choose-and it is a choice-to crush joy with bitterness, am I not purposefully choosing to take the way of the Prince of Darkness? Choosing the angry way of Lucifer because I think it is more effective-more expedient-than giving thanks?

Topics: Crush, Jesus, Powerful, Exasperation

Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.57, Zondervan

Topics: Gratitude, Life Changing, Grateful

I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.68, Zondervan

Topics: Moments, Full Life

God’s not out to get you - He’s out to give to you.

Topics: Giving

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

Topics: Practice, Piano, Want

Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perserverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.90, Zondervan

Topics: Grace, Shadow, Comfort, Mercy And Forgiveness

What if I gave thanks in the trouble, for the trouble, because the trouble is a gift that causes me to turn? What if I loved God not for His goods but for His love itself that is goodness enough?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2012). “One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces”, p.156, Zondervan

Topics: What If, His Love, Causes

Every day, with every word, we get to decide: Do we mar the world, or mark the world?

source: - Twitter post from Jun 7, 2017

Topics: Mars, World, Mark

Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.133, Zondervan

Topics: Gratitude, Stressful Situations, Blindness

The joy of the Lord is your strength and the person of Christ is your unassailable joy - and the battle for joy is nothing less than fighting the good fight of faith.

Topics: Fighting, Joy, Battle, Good Fight

Real Womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father.

source: - Twitter post from May 10, 2013

Topics: Mother, Father, Real, Real Women

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.

Topics: Jesus, Acceptance, Crowds

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

Topics: Fighting, Feelings, Way

The answer to deep anxiety is the deep adoration of God.

source: - Twitter post from Aug 15, 2016

Topics: Anxiety, Answers, Adoration

The only way to care for the disadvantaged - is to disadvantage yourself -which is guaranteed to turn out for your advantage.

Topics: Care, Way, Advantage

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Girl, Dog

Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are a divine choice.

Topics: Gratitude, Choices, Way

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

Topics: Paris, Making Love

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?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.90, Zondervan

Topics: Perseverance, Rain, Clouds, Mercy And Forgiveness, Greater Good

Without God’s Word as a lens, the world warps

Topics: Lenses, World, Warp

God appoints people who do disappoint - to point to a God who never disappoints.

Topics: People, Disappoint

God gives us time. And who has time for God?

Topics: Giving

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.

Topics: Christian, Hands, Giving

Love doesn't necessarily mean bless or agree with, it means sacrifice for and suffer with.

Topics: Mean, Sacrifice, Suffering

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).

Topics: Grief, Light, Work Out, Ephesians, Things Work Out

Real Love truthfully sees the flaws - and still really loves fully.

source: - Twitter post from Feb 14, 2014

Topics: Real, Flaws, Truth Love

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.16, Zondervan

Topics: Loss, Sight, Black

I began [blogging] because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Blogging, Figures, Handicaps

It’s impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fear

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.203, Zondervan

Topics: Giving, Thanks, Impossible

Sometimes, too often, I don't want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier.

Topics: Stress, Anxiety, Energy, Stress And Anxiety, Muster

But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.29, Zondervan

Topics: Giving, Waiting, Forever

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

Topics: Fall, Expectations, Weight, Love Always

The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.149, Zondervan

Topics: Want, Condemnation, Remedy, Suffocating, Facets

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.

Topics: Names, Thorns, Lips

Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did. He shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.

source: - Source: churchleaders.com

Topics: Doors, Two, Work Out

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.

Topics: Gratitude, Strong, Morning, Relationship Advice, Happily Married

Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.45, Zondervan

Topics: Doors, Firsts, Steps

If the Church is a body, and the body is a business, isn't that the same thing as prostitution?

Topics: Church, Body, Prostitution

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

Topics: Communication, Soul, Poor, Disconnected

Maybe the man who said that his doctor had pulled him off Prozac because One Thousand Gifts and taking the dare to write 1,000 gifts was healing deep places in him and leading him to *experience* joy.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Healing, Writing, Men, One Thousand Gifts, Prozac

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.22, Zondervan

Topics: Heart, Sight, Soul, Heart Ache

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

Topics: Joy, Fullness

Until we call attention to the moments of our lives, we miss our lives.

Topics: Missing, Attention, Moments

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.77, Zondervan

Topics: Years, Losing, Awareness, Losing Time

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.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.15, Zondervan

Topics: Ungrateful, Humanity, Firsts

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

Topics: Missing, Invisible, Visible

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

Topics: Littles, Rooms, Source

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

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.61, Zondervan

Topics: Life Changing, Thanks, Asks

I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.17, Zondervan

Topics: Filling In, World, Hunger

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

Topics: Gratitude, Winning, Giving

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.

Topics: Giving, Leaving, Needs, Time Is Money

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.

Topics: Eye, Keys, Giving, Hard Things

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

Topics: Heart, Two, Broken

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

source: - "One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces". Book by Ann Voskamp, 2012.

Topics: Thanksgiving, Believe, Causes

When your ethnicity is heaven, then all adversity offers the gift of intimacy, driving you into the home of His heart.

Topics: Home, Heart, Adversity

Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash

Topics: Lions, Satan, Leashes

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Writing, Challenges, Wonder

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

Topics: Blessing, Water, Joy, Joy Within

The message of Christmas is not that we can make peace. Or that we can make love, make light, make gifts, or make this world save itself. The message of Christmas is that this world’s a mess and we can never save ourselves from ourselves and we need a Messiah.

Topics: Light, Making Love, Needs, Messiah

Writing is this act of faith - a bit like driving in the fog: you can hardly see just in front of you. But you trust God's leading you and you just write into the space you can see ahead of you.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Writing, Fog, Space

I started blogging in 2004, light years ago on the Web. And I began because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.

source: - Source: churchleaders.com

Topics: Light, Years, Blogging, Light Years

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

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.33, Zondervan

Topics: Thanksgiving, Gratitude, Joy

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?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.88, Zondervan

Topics: Used, Accomplish, Gods Will

That little burning bush that is the signature of the blog - it echoes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's words.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Echoes, Signatures, Burning, Burning Bush

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?

source: - "Finding Joy in the Nitty-Gritty: An Interview with Ann Voskamp". "Homeschool Heartbeat" podcast with Mike Farris (Volume 127, Week 14), hslda.org. August 8-12, 2016.

Topics: Children, Eye, Simple

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.

Topics: Prayer, Thinking, Soul

Any kind of love that lacks the iron of the Cross in it, is anemic love.

source: - Ann Voskamp (2016). “The Broken Way (with Bonus Content): A Daring Path into the Abundant Life”, p.51, Zondervan

Topics: Iron, Kind, Crosses

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.

Topics: Attention, Weight, Moments

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.

Topics: Children, Impossible, Parenthood

What is time for if not to bless?

source: - Ann Voskamp (2011). “One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are”, p.188, Zondervan

Topics: Bless, Ifs

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.

source: - "Finding Joy in the Nitty-Gritty: An Interview with Ann Voskamp". "Homeschool Heartbeat" podcast with Mike Farris (Volume 127, Week 14), hslda.org. August 8-12, 2016.

Topics: Gratitude, Stress, Giving, Reset

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Times bestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.

source: - Source: churchleaders.com

Topics: Hurt, New York, Book, Hurting People, One Thousand Gifts

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.

Topics: Hands, Feet, Forever

Maybe the woman who was handed the book [One Thousand Gifts] by a friend the morning before she had an abortion scheduled - and read the book and realized that this pregnancy that she didn't want - perhaps it too could be a gift from God? And then she said showed me the photo of this laughing 5 month old boy.

source: - Source: www.churchleaders.com

Topics: Morning, Pregnancy, Book, One Thousand Gifts

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

Topics: Thanksgiving, Stress, Worry, Stress And Worry, Undisciplined

I was simply writing out our family stories in my online journal, scratching out what I want to remember, what I was wrestling out with God. Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did.