by Abby King
I’m slipping my post in quietly this weekend to tell you about a beautiful book I’m reading, called One Thousand Gifts: a dare to live fully right where you are, by Ann Voskamp. It begins with two stories: Ann, as a four-year-old, along with the rest of her family, watches her 18-month-old sister get killed when she is run over by a truck in their front yard. Years later, she watches as her brother-in-law’s two baby boys both die of the same rare genetic disease.
These two events from Ann’s life touch the painful places in all our lives. All our stories hold grief, heartache, anguish. All is not right with the world and we have never known it more clearly. And our stories shape our questions: Where were you God? Can you be trusted? If you really and truly love me, why is this happening? Why don’t you answer my prayers?
Ann writes:
I think of buried babies and broken, weeping fathers over graves, and a world pocked with pain… I wonder too… if the rent in the canvas of our backdrop, the losses that punctuate our world, our own emptiness, might actually become the places to see.
To see through to God.
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.
Maybe so.
But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places? How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy? Self-focus for God-communion?
A friend challenges her to find one thousand things she loves, that are gifts, that she can be grateful for. And in taking up the dare, Ann begins to learn gratitude for the moment, how not to carve up life into blessing and curse, but to see all as grace, all moments as gift. Her story of the painstaking discipline of learning to be thankful and see God in every moment takes us through learning to build bridges of trust and see each moment of our lives through the lens of His word. In her own, poetic style she guides us through this path, whispering that “the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.”
And so I am counting too. And learning that some days it is easy and some days it is hard. But I want to live fully, right where I am. I want to be grateful in all the moments and see the grace and love that pours into them all. I want to learn how to live in His joy today, rather than wait to find it in tomorrow.
What about you? Could you count to a thousand?
You can read Ann’s blog here.
You can join a book group discussing One Thousand Gifts here.
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Over the last couple of days, Lanie and Niki have talked about how they were inspired and challenged by a book called Crazy Love. 
