Eucharisteo

I recently finished a devotional written by Ann Voskamp from her popular book called One Thousand Gifts.  It's written so beautifully - sometimes too beautifully, if that's possible, but it is written in all honesty and it led me to praise the Lord more from start to finish.  I read this book on my tablet though and it's cramped my style for blogging the keeper quotes since I never have my tablet near me when I am at the computer!  Today, finally, I did and so I'll get this posted once and for all.  Some thinkers and amen moments from One Thousand Gifts Devotional I read in December, with my faves in bold.

• God, cause me to know it afresh today; the life that counts blessings discovers its yielding much more than it seems.
• What is the root sin, the molten core of wickedness and godlessness?  Isn't that what we have to figure out?  It's right there in Romans 1.  It's not the sinfulness you'd think it'd be; It's the thanklessness - that we do.  It's our thanklessness that first stirs the full wrath of God. ...  Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness...
• And there it is:  If all the dismembering wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting - then the act of literally counting blessings literally re-members us to God.
• And I wonder if this is why thanks is the highest form of thought - because this is always the right order of things;  Us laid low.  Before God on High.
• Our world reels unless we rejoice.  A song of thanks steadies everything.  The answer to anxiety is the adoration of Christ.  The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.
• Anxiety has been my natural posture; stiffness, my default.  The way I curl up my toes, tight retreat.  How I angle my jaw, braced, chisel the brow with the lines of distrust.  How I don't fold my hands in prayer, how I weld them into tight fists of control.  Always control - psuedopower from the pit. How I refuse to relinquish worry, like a babe a mother won't forsake, an identity.
• Are stress and worry evidences of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love?
• Life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.
• Lord God, there will be walls I run into today, walls that seem to box me in, walls that have writing on them that I long to decode.  When I rightly read Your word, I can rightly read the world; the graffiti of this world is grace in Your hands.
• What insanity compels me to shrivel up when there is joy's water to be had here?  In this wilderness, I keep circling back to this: I'm blind to joy's well every time I really don't want it. The well is always there.  And I choose not to see it.  Don't I really want joy? Don't I really want the fullest life?  For all my yearning for joy, longing for joy, begging for joy - is the bald truth that I prefer the empty dark?  Why do I lunge for control instead of joy?  Is it somehow more perversely satisfying to flex control's muscle? Ah - power - like Satan.
• Today, let me do hard things; live the hard discipline to give thanks in hard things. Today I want to lean hard on You - who softens my heart.
• Giving thanks to God is what ushers one into the very presence of God.  And this is why he asks us to always give thanks.
• As G.K. Chesterton wrote, 'How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.'
• "Expectations kill relationships."  And I've known expectations as a disease, like a silent killer heaping her burdens on the shoulders of a relationship until the soul bursts a pulmonary and dies.  Expectations kill relationships - especially with God. ... Lord, I repent of it all: the expectations that kill relationships and the entitlement that steals joy.  Please, Lord, today, make me small and surprised by staggering grace!  Make me remember that humility comes before happiness.
• Lord, what would happen today if I saw all the not-enough, too-little in my life to be but a seed?  All the hardly-things could be holy-things - small somethings You are growing into more glory for You.  Cause me to believe again:  All feasts began as seeds.
• Lord God, today, make me giddy with gratitude for Your covenanted gifts - all joy, all acceptance, all completeness, all in Christ.  Never let my heart grow so cold that I get over this.  Wed me to worship and woo me to praise and wake me to the Word-God who deserves my all.
• For years, I tried medication, blade, work, escape, all attempts to drown out that incessant, reverberating drum of self-rejection. All futility, acidic emptiness.  But here, I hear it well:  The only thing to rip out the tape echoing self-rejection is the song of His serenade.  One thousand gifts tuned me to the beat.  It really is like CS Lewis argued - the the most fundamental thing is not how we think of God but rather what God thinks of us; "How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.'"  Years of Christian discipleship, Bible study, churchgoing had been about me thinking about God; practicing eucharisteo was the very first I had really considered at length what God thought of me - this ridiculous and relentlessly pursuing love, so bold.  Everywhere, everything, Love!
• Bless the Lord, O my soul - because this is what blesses the soul.
• Unless we make it a habit to give thanks, we habitually give our family grief.  Unless we consistently speak praise, we consistently speak poison.  Unless we are intentional about giving God glory throughout the day, our days unintentionally give way to grumbling.
• All fear is but the notion that God's love ends.
• Murmuring thanks doesn't deny that an event is a tragedy and neither does it deny that there's a cracking fissure straight across the heart.  Giving thanks is only this:  making a canyon of pain into a microphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God.  Our thanks to God is our witness to the goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.
• There is nothing I refuse to thank You for - because I am convinced there is nothing You won't redeem.
• YHWH - sounds like our breathing - aspirated consonants.  God Himself names Himself - and the name he chooses is the sound of our own breathing.
• To read His message in all the moments, in the waiting moments, the dark moments, the moments before the blooming, I'll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word, to read His writing in the world.  Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world.
• Bless the Lord, oh my soul, bless the very Maker of my soul.
• "Honk if you're happy" is really "to be happy, honk."  And "give thanks if you are joy-filled" is really "to be joy-filled, give thanks."