One Thousand Gifts -- Voskamp

One Thousand Gifts
Ann Voskamp
Zondervan: 2010, 237pp.
           *****

Ann loves beauty and she loves words.  She also loves her God, as is evident in this book--a thank-offering all strung together with words poetic and fragile as blown glass--words that sing and ache and cry.  One Thousand Gifts is Ann's testimony of learning to give thanks in everything--the bitter, the ugly, the painful, and the mundane; and in so doing of seeing it metamorphosed into a beautiful gift entrusted in love and offered back as a thank-offering.  Her own life is vulnerably woven through the pages right from first page: "...and I enter the world like every person born enters the world: with clenched fists...Vermix-creased and squalling, I am held to the light."  Ann's name means: "full of grace" and introduces the underlying question answered in the book's unfolding: "What does it mean to live full of grace? To live fully alive?"

The ensuing pages are poetic reflections of finding grace in every experience by offering thanks to God for it.   This book may not be for the reader that prefers a cut-and-dried storyline, spelled out in plain prose.  The summary for you would be: learn to give thanks in every moment for everything by making note (literally) with pen on paper, of the blessings great and miniscule that cross your path each day.  Keep a running count.  The initial goal for putting the habit in place is enumerating 1,000 gifts.

Your list may look quite different than Ann's which has such picturesque entries as:
 "Morning shadows across the old floors"
"Cry of blue jay from high in the spruce"
"Hoarfrost flaking off tree limbs"
"Salvation of sinners, me, chief"
"Barns"
"Pinky skin of newborn pigs"
but the point is to recognize the good and beautiful things that God is doing in your life continuously--the custom-made moments that give evidence of a Lover wooing His beloved. Your list need not be poetic; it is your own trail of thanksgiving.

But rest-assured that even Ann's book is not so poetic that it misses real life! She is a farmer's wife and mother to a quiver-full of young growing farmhands.  Her writing flows from this full and down-to-earth life.  It is a bouquet that is bound to inspire the reader's own flowering of thanks!  Ann has pointed the way by her own hard-earned habit of gratefulness.  She shows us how to look at life, even in the very hard seasons, as a continuous flow of good and perfect gifts, custom made for us by the Lover of our souls.

In addition to her own experiences, Ann's book gives evidence of deep and thoughtful reading, first and foremost of the Bible.  Her meditations and wrestlings with Scripture are the grist which shapes her thoughts.  In addition she pulls timely quotes and observations from a wide range of gifted writers ranging from C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers in the not so distant past, to Saint Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and Julian of Norwich further back, and modern writers such as John Piper, Annie Dillard and Brennan Manning.  These gleanings are skillfully woven into her own life observations enriching them and connecting them to the life of the Bride of Christ down through time.  Gratitude is not a new practice, but is here given a refreshing face lift that invites us all to be intentional about noticing God's gifts in our generation.

I hope you'll enjoy this gift of well-worded wonder as much as I have and move from it to be a more intentional giver of thanks.

--LS

If you enjoy Ann's writing you won't want to miss her regular blogs at http://www.aholyexperience.com/ which are embellished with her own artistic photography.  They are the notes from which this book has grown, and are likewise excellent and inspiring.