Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare To Live Fully Right Where You Are Quotes

...the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.

A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.

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.

Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.

Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.

Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash

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

Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.

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?

Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.

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.

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.

Stress isn't only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.

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

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

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgement and effort to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

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

Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on.

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.

All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no.

Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.

I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify.

The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving.

God holds us in the untamed moments too.

Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end.

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

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)'.

Awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee.

The joy of small that makes life large.

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy. (Page 57)

How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. (Page 58)

I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ and 'everything is eucharisteo'.

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.

Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps.

Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks.

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?

The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?

Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love?

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'.