I am reposting the "Meet Ann" page from Ann Voskamp's website. I just want to know why I haven't found her before! I just posted something from her on my previous blog. Thank You, God, for such an amazing lady!
Yeah… wondrous, amazing you, just looking around for Deep Peace and True Beauty.
I get it. Me too — hunting for a corner of joy and grace and God.
A gift to meet you!
I’m Ann Voskamp, a plain Ann without even the fanciful “e”, wife to The Farmer, mama to six, and honestly, I’m a bit of a mess. It’s okay, really.
Grace is the most amazing of all.
I had a full-tuition scholarship to university and never finished.
I married a Farmer instead & came home to gravel road & cornfields.
I had babies. Half a dozen beautiful babies. My laundry basket is never empty. I lose library books. I homeschool our six exuberant kids and most days I feel just a tad bit overwhelmed and crazy.
When the kids and the washing machine sleep, I wash my real dirt down with words and The Word.
I stayed up late for too long and wrote a book, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Zondervan). {You can read some of crazy reviews about it here.} God’s put it on the New York Time’s Bestseller’s list for something like 59 weeks now. It’s proof that God really does use broken, messed up, and fallible lives anyways.
Christianity Today slipped my mug on it’s cover, as one of the leading 50 women most shaping culture and the church today — and I got down on my knees and prayed real hard, God being strongest when we are absolute weakest.
I scratch out words for DaySpring’s (in)Courage, speak with the amazing Women of Faith team, am a contributing editor for The High Calling, and I’m not going to lie, my knees knocked hard when I was on the Today Show with Kathie Lee Gifford. Grace, the articles in ChristianityToday.com, WORLD Magazineand Huffington Post, but I feel ridiculously alive as an advocate for Compassion, traveling and speaking on behalf of the needy. The poor have made me rich and telling the stories of those who need a voice — has changed mine.
… but honestly? the only words that really matter?
Are the ones I live.
This convicts me.
I keep writing it out here everyday, the words I am seeking to live — about this wondrously messy, everyday-holy life….
about finding the beauty and quiet,
about slowing to see the sacred in the chaos,
the Cross in the clothespin,
the flame in the bush.
Just listening – laundry, liturgy, life, — all of life, holy ground. A holy experience — because God has flaming bushes everywhere.
It’d be pure grace to walk a bit, you and I – to live the words together…
What I Believe:
I believe in Jehovah God who created the whirling galaxies, the birds soaring in the sky overhead, the endless crashing waves and all that dances within them. I believe in Father of all who knits together life, made in His very own image, in the secret quiet of our beings.
I believe in Jesus Christ, the One with no earthly Father, with the dust of this earth between His toes, and with our names etched onto the palm of His hands, right beneath the nail scars…Who now sits at the Father’s right hand making endless intercession on our behalf. I believe in the stone rolled away, in the Body being raised, in the first fruits of the dead…and us all following soon, very soon.
I believe in the Cross as our only Hope, our only Claim, our only Savior, and our only Foundation. I believe that in the pounding surf of life we have only one thing to cling to: the feet of our Lord Jesus, hanging on that tree, His lifeblood flowing down, washing us whiter than snow. It’s all by His staggering grace, lest any man should boast.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, moving, whispering, indwelling our very being. I believe in living by the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, and producing fruit in the Spirit…in the Spirit who helps us in our weakness with groanings that can’t be expressed in words.
I believe in the infallibility of the Bible, God’s Word – a sure Word, a pure Word, the only secure Word. I believe the words on those pages are breathed from the very throne room of heaven, are the love letter penned from the heart of God; a beacon of light for stumbling feet to find sure footing on a dark path.
I believe there is more than believing. There is living what I believe.
Thus this journal.
~Ann Voskamp
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