Thank you Ann Voskamp

The house is silent. And I am grateful. Quiet Time.  For stillness. For thoughtfulness.  For confronting the things deep within that are unsettled and wearisome and weighty enough that they illicit tears. I am cracked and parched and desperate for someone to soothe.

I reach for a book, words to fill the last few moments of wakefulness, and realizing the book I am presently reading (Frankenstein) is left downstairs, I reach out, almost reluctantly, for Ann Voskamp's book, One Thousand Gift, which is a permanent fixture on my bedside table,  The past few days have been, well, a bit angsty and panicky and hard. The struggle for joy- a painfully real struggle. The ordinary, which I normally see as life giving and hope-filled,  clouded, not full of beauty, but dreadfully dull, monotonous, meaningless.

And yet, even in my dread, I reach for this book on thanksgiving and living the eucharistic life and find again what initially drew me to this work so many years ago: a source of healing, a promise of peace once again. Thanks. Giving thanks. Deliberately and constantly. If I felt the joy draining from me, perhaps it was because I stopped saying, "thank you" and forgetting, to quote my staretz, Mary Oliver, that "my work is loving the world." Loving the world right where I am at. Loving those right in front of me.

"I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and I keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt and I could be an expert on the life full, the beauty meat that lurks in every moment. I hunger to taste life. God."

Thank you Ann Voskamp