One Thousand Gifts - Book Review

I am reading (almost finished) with One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Have you read this book? It is excellent! I mean, really, really good. Even for those who don't have time to read, this book is worthy of finding time. If you're like me, then when I tell you this book is about finding joy and thankfulness in the living of life, you might think you are already joyful and don't need a book to encourage this. But, it really is much, much more. Yes, it's a book about thankfulness and joy but it is challenging and convicting and encouraging and grace-filling and more. Voskamp's writing style is, at times, a stream of consciousness and nearly every paragraph has a statement that will make you think. I could read this book a few pages at a time, ponder them, and then pick it back up - it's that meaty. Yet, it's not a textbook and it's not a hard read. It's just a mom of six kids, living on a farm, doing the mundane, everyday, sharing life, and learning to passionately love and live in His grace in every moment.

" 'When one is thirsty one quenches one's thirst by drinking, not by reading books which treat of this condition.' If we are dying of thirst, passively reading books about water quenches little; the only way to quench the parched mouth is to close the book and dip the hand into water and bring it to the lips. If we thirst, we'll have to drink.

I would have to do something.

But I hadn't known at all the day I laid aside the books about eucharisteo [giving thanks] and picked up a pen to begin that list that I was really taking down, swallowing, the first real drink and how I'd transform. Or that the transformation would be so visible." -p. 44.

From this Voskamp sets out to write a list of 1000 things she is thankful for. The naming of gifts transforms her and what God showed her - is showing her - she shares in raw, beautiful, heart-felt words that have challenged me in my walk.

Later she writes the following: "A hunter trying to capture. And none of the shots are close enough, wide enough, radiant enough for the hunter. What is this that I feel sitting here, coursing through me relentless, hot, ardent? I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don't see God, I'll bow down before something else. . .

I know it here kneeling, the twilight so still: nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature. I had told it once to a questioning son that theology is but that born of theos and logy - God and study - and theology is to study God. I had always thought of the hefty concordances on the high shelf in the study, but isn't this, too, the deep study of the Spirit God? The revelation of God over the farm?" - p.110

Well, that's just a tidbit of Voskamp's writing style and the depth of the topic of giving thanks. If you can get your hands on this book, I can't recommend it highly enough!