Meet Ann – Ann Voskamp
I
like you already!
like 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.
A gift to meet you!
I’m Ann Voskamp, a plain Ann without even the fanciful “e”, wife to The Farmer, mama to 7, 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 and one birthed from our heart and flown home from China. My laundry basket is never empty. I lose library books. I homeschool our crazy 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 stayed up late for too long and wrote my first book, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Zondervan).
God’s put it on the New York Time’s Bestseller’s list for something like 65 weeks and it’s sold more than a million copies and been translated into more than 22 languages. It’s proof that God really does use broken, messed up, and fallible lives anyways.
And then I wrote 3 more New York Time’s Bestsellers:
The Greatest Gift,
Unwrapping the Greatest Gift,
and The Broken Way — A Daring Path into the Abundant Life.
Telling my brokenhearted story is simply telling how The Greatest Story ever told has completely changed mine.
Christianity Today slipped this mug on it’s cover, as one of the leading 50 women most shaping culture and the church today — and I got down on my knees and prayed real hard, God using the absolute weakest and most unlikely.
Yeah, there was the Today Show with Kathie Lee Gifford, and articles in ChristianityToday.com, WORLD Magazine and Huffington Post, but I feel most ridiculously alive as an advocate for Compassion.
… 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, — all of life, holy ground. A holy experience — because God has flaming bushes everywhere.
It’d be pure grace to walk a bit, you and I — to live the words together…
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, our only Savior, 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 perfect Lord Jesus, hanging on that tree, His lifeblood flowing down, washing us whiter than snow. It’s all by His staggering grace, lest any man should boast.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, moving, whispering, indwelling our very being. 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 God; 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.
~Ann Voskamp
“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.
