Ann Voskamp Quotes - Page 6

Because One died for me that I might breathe this breath...It's all a gift.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

Living radical isn't about where you live - it's about how you love.

It’s impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fear

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

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

God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.

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.

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

Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory.

Praying with eyes wide open is the only way to pray without ceasing.

Hurry always empties a soul.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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