Ilike you already!
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 … and stillness.
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 write for DaySpring’s site, (in)Courage, am a contributing editor for The High Calling, with articles in ChristianityToday.com and The Beacon, and now and then, I stand before microphones and pray hard before I speak.
I scratched out words in an award-winning series for curious kids, A Child’s Geography (Knowledge Quest Press, 2007), of which all profits are donated to Compassion, and I’m an advocate for Compassion, travelling 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.
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 right here. God put it on the New York Time’s Bestseller’s list. I weep wonder when I read how God’s changing lives through those humble pages and it’s just proof that God really does use broken, messed up, and fallible lives anyways.
… 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, — holy ground.
A holy experience — because all of life flames with God.
It’d be pure grace to walk a bit, you and I – to live the words together…
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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, 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, hanging on that tree, His lifeblood flowing down, washing us whiter than snow.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, moving, whispering, indwelling our very skin. 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 the Lover of our souls; 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.
“God is not a belief to which you give your assent. God becomes a reality whom you know intimately, meet everyday, one whose strength becomes your strength, whose love, your love. Live this life of the presence of God long enough and when someone asks you, “Do you believe there is a God?” you may find yourself answering, “No, I do not believe there is a God. I know there is a God.”
~Ernest Boyer, Jr.
I believe in the The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed and our fellowship’s statement of faith. We’re just simple, farming folk, worshipping in a Brethren Bible Chapel, and are non-denominational, evangelical (believing in the necessity of salvation in Christ), Bible believing (embracing the Bible as God’s infallible and complete message to all people) and grace-clinging.
Photo of Bible on our table Bible box, Hope Voskamp, used with permission
