From Ann Voskamp

During our first meeting last week of our book study on Ann Voskamp's, One Thousand Gifts, I shared the following with our group of women. I am blessed by her words and I hope you are too. This is just a small example of her poetic and graceful writing style. Oh how I long to learn how to live the full, rich life of thankfulness.

Praying for you, Women of Thanks! Thank you for joining us on this journey of gratitude!

She isn't 24 hours old yet.
Still that heaven scent upon her skin.
When I pull her close I whisper right into her ear.
Whisper in her the meaning of life.
The one thing she needs to know before she's as old as I am and has messed up as much as I have...
moments.
I'd tell her this...
moments - this is all we have.
Microscopic, fleeting moments.
Her eye lashes flutter in dreams and I wonder...
how many moments of my life have my eyes been wide open but I've been rushing, racing, sleeping right through?
How many of the popsicle days and the running and twirling and spinning days.
How many of the moments of melting ice cream and crazy laughter and dangling bare feet and the setting sun igniting the moment of NOW.
Someone wake me up to the beating of wings and splashing of water... the setting of fog at twilight... the way the leaves and the childhood slip away in the woods, torched with the last of summer.
I want to tell her this...
You have GOT to figure out a way to stay FULLY awake!
Time's blurring by and everyone's slipping past and how do we wake to the moments?
How do we stop living life as an emergency... something to be sped wildly through... LIFE IS NOT AN EMERGENCY!
How do we start believing that life can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried?
A bubble held in awe... how do we stop wolfing life down - cuz life is our only dessert - too brief, too sweet, too delectable to hurry.
To live like a boy I once knew... pause between bites.
To wiggle his one tooth loose and whisper, "I love you mom."
And all this... all this... all these moments... all these are for YOU!
Isn't that the voice we have to learn to hear?
The voice that is telling the whole world that the earth under you and the rain over you and all the stars spinning all around you - this is for you... for you... FOR you!
Your true love smile and the nap and the patch of light, the whirl of bike spokes and the wild rose on the sill and that one great puff for flickering candles of a birthday cake... these are all for you.
What if we really figured it out? That gratitude for the seemingly small and insignificant - this is the seed that plants the giant miracle in the midst of it all - so COUNT the ways He loves... a 1,000 more.... never stop... so that when you wake in the morning you can't help unfold your hands to the heavens.
And though you grieve and though you wonder... though the world is ugly... it IS beautiful! And though time moves on - it's moments are holy.
And though the planet spins a blur - you can slow and you can wake and you can trust and you can pay attention to the moments with this offering of thanks.
Because THIS is how you spend your one life well... receiving each moment for what it really is - holy. Ordinary. Amazing Grace. A gift.