Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.

Every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God?

The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging.

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.

I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things . Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.

The whole of the life -- even the hard -- is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.

I don't really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done-yesterday.