one thousand gifts

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I am currently reading through (soaring through really) Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts which is, as books go, a thing of utter beauty. Through poetic prose that aches with art, Voskamp dares the reader to “live fully right where you are.”

Voskamp’s narrative begins very circumstantially and personally as she recounts personal tragedies in the real realm of her own real life. There is no distance for the writer between her honest responses to grief and the questions created, the vacancies left in her life, places where she felt afraid to attempt to fill with God.

There is no mistaking the knee-jerk, human response to the unexplainable, when bad things happen to good people. I have looked into the mirror more than once in my life and seen those “good people,” been those “good people.”
Ultimately, Voskamp stumbles upon a concept which even to her sounds too good to be true, too simplistic to really work, the pursuit of the miracle of eucharisteo as a discipline, a learned behaviour. Through the act of compiling a list of a thousand blessings, gifts from the Lord, could she learn to express true thanksgiving even for circumstances which she might never understand?

The book is Voscamp’s journey, and it is truly transformative to read.

Voskamp writes, “God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse. It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world turns right. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He stirs me, all joy afoot. This, I think, is the other side of prayer.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderous if many of us, even some of us, started such a list? How might naming one thousand gifts transform this community? The naming of simple gifts on ordinary days….if you are intrigued by this, I highly recommend you read this book.

-written by Kerri Snell, contributing author.

Check out One Thousand Gifts for yourself at The Well!

Mind of Winter

Poet Wallace Stevens writes “One must have the mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” His famous poem “The Snow Man” speaks to insignificance with its repetitive use of the word “nothing” three times in the last stanza of the poem. Snow has a way of making me feel insignificant. The tracks my boots make from door to driveway can be covered over with a fresh sprinkling of the white stuff. Snow is quiet. Snow is neutralizing. Each person, each animal, each fledgling winter plant must feel the cold.

Christ tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that the rain falls on the just and the unjust–another great weather equalizer.

Sometimes I try to make more of myself than need be, I try to insert my influence, my ideas, my presence onto scenarios and people who aren’t really looking for anything new. There are people out there who don’t try to build a Snowman out of Snow, who aren’t interested in my recipe for Snow Ice Cream, and who don’t want to commit Stevens’ great poem to memory as I have.

There are those who don’t want to feel their insignificance, and sometimes, lots of times, I am one of those. Oh, the scratching and the clawing and the igloo constructing that commences with a solemn force to make my Winter Wonderland a better place.

We Christians don’t have a corner on hope and non-Christians certainly don’t have the sole patent for discontentment and errant strife, do they? As the rain and the snow fall upon each of us,without preference, I would do good to let the quiet ice of winter just fall and not try to make more or less of it than it is, than I am.

I would do well to look more deeply inside myself and let my story be simply that, however dull or ordinary the light I am cast in. If I have the courage to do that and only that, oh, the comfort that comes from such a decision. The closeness I will feel to God even as I realize how pitiful I am in comparison to the God who created each snowflake uniquely.

It sounds backwards, almost anti-American. It sounds wimpy and fitfully dull–to surrender to the notion that God’s will is not one bit dependent upon me, that life is not a Jack-in-the-Box crank that I turn and turn and turn in order to get a pop-up blessing. To realize “the nothing” that I am, is the first real breath a born-again Christian can take, and then I stop squirming in the Almighty’s Hand. I stop defining myself by comparisons to others. I stop limiting myself to lifestyle trends and manmade, denominational hierarchies.

A Christian should be….I stop saying this at all, except to say a Christian, a child of God, a follower of Christ, should be playful, joyful, a roll-in-the-snow-soul because nothing we can do or not do can taint the Victory that is ours in Jesus Christ. In Stevens’ poem, paradoxically, the word nothing is the most important word in the poem. My “nothing” truly surrendered to God could be the most important something to me.

“For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” –Wallace Stevens

-submitted Kerri Snell

Hiccups

There have been a few “tragic flaws” in my character which I obviously was not all that attached to. They were like prom dresses–all poofy and brightly colored and ready for one moment, but not suitable for a new or different occasion. These “sins” were relatively easy for me to overcome, to just walk away from and never look back. Because I had not integrated the sin into my positive sense of identity, I could see the sin for what it was–an ugly and demeaning feature which I was all-too-happy to rid myself of through repentance and prayer.

The sins which spring from my own gift set, from the talents and abilities and personality which God created for kingdom purposes, these are the sins which are like camaflouge in the jungle–hard to find, and hard to snuff out. These are the sins which place worms in the fruits of the spirit. These are the sins for which the potential to re-visit never goes away. These are the mistakes we “fall not on our knees but on our hearts” in repentance of as Vassar Miller puts it.

Nothing makes me realize how hopeless I am without the Grace of Christ than hiccups of faith, mistakes which I can’t seem to learn a full lesson from without repeated offenses. I am beginning to accept the notion that some of these potential errors are like rapidly breeding termites within the trunk of a tree, within the strongest part of that tree, or like cancer cells free-floating through a blood stream before a deadly lump is found. Or perhaps it’s more like my own immune system fighting itself and creating diseased havoc within what should be my healthiest cells.


The Great Physician says in his Scripture (prescription) that it is vitally important what the patient does after the hiccup. Pride must be swallowed fully with a great swig of Living Water, and prayer must follow. After I have fallen once again on my heart, I must pick myself back up and start again and believe in the newness of applied grace.


We hear much from the pulpits much about catastrophic sins, the mistakes you might make and not live to tell about. The error in judgement which might have no reversible track. Yet, the hiccups can build and fester and left unrecognized and unattended can change what was supposed to be, what was planned by God to be that beautiful, intangible quality of a person–that element which is the difference between “craft” and “art.” The hiccups not taken seriously enough can bring down a kingdom, one person at a time, in such an individual and private way that the great tree never knows what eats him.


We must give the best parts of ourselves to God, completely at His disposal and bidding for whatever purpose He so chooses. When we mess up, as soon as we mess up, we must set our feet back on the path of small steps again. Even if it isn’t a matter of our eternity (I’ll leave that to the greats to argue), it’s a matter of our usefulness on this earth while we are here.


Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5,6


Submitted by Kerri Snell