Ann Voskamp Quotes

We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks. Because how else do we accept His free gift of salvation if not with thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives. Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes! to His grace.

How to 'live' in a state of awe when life is mundane and ordinary?

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

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

I glance back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I've boldly driven straight across without second thought, and I see truth reflecting back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren't I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don't believe? But if I'm grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my beliefs and I trust Him again.

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

When we lay the soil of our hard lives opened the rain of grace and let Joy permeate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? for us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks. p. 58

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.

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

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?

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)'.

Hurry always empties a soul.

The mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past — so the mind can cling to its own illusion of control. But the current moment? It cannot be controlled. And what a mind can’t control, it tends to discount. Brush past ... over. It’s the battle plan of the enemy of the soul — to keep us blind to this current moment, the one we can’t control, to keep us blind to Him, the One who controls everything.

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

That is what a shadow is, and empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is this - a hole in the goodness of God.

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

He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).

I am blessed. I can bless.

Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.

I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.

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

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'.

To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? ... We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselves... when we find Him.