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!