I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.
Ann VoskampI didn't (and still don't) have comments [in my blog]. It's about simply writing for an audience of One.
Ann VoskampPick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.
Ann VoskampNo one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.
Ann VoskampLife-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.
Ann VoskampThe wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.
Ann Voskamp