One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are [Hardcover]

Ann Voskamp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2011

Just like you, Ann Voskamp hungers to live her one life well. Forget the bucket lists that have us escaping our everyday lives for exotic experiences. 'How,' Ann wondered, 'do we find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt, drama, and daily duties? What does the Christ-life really look like when your days are gritty, long--and sometimes even dark? How is God even here?' In One Thousand Gifts, Ann invites you to embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative spiritual discipline of chronicling God's gifts. It's only in this expressing of gratitude for the life we already have, we discover the life we've always wanted...a life we can take, give thanks for, and break for others. We come to feel and know the impossible right down in our bones: we are wildly loved--by God. Let Ann's beautiful, heart-aching stories of the everyday give you a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace, a way of being present to God that makes you deeply happy, and a way of living that is finally fully alive. Come live the best dare of all!

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ann Voskamp invites us to slow down, to learn how to live the full life of eucharisteo (with grace, thanksgiving, joy) regardless of circumstances. With lovely word pictures inspired by everyday life in her family and on her farm, she writes about her struggle to live joyfully amid sin and sorrow and suffering. -- WORLD Magazine <br><br> (WORLD Magazine )

From the Back Cover

Just like you, Ann Voskamp hungers to live her one life well. Forget the bucket lists that have us escaping our everyday lives for exotic experiences. 'How,' Ann wondered, 'do we find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt, drama, and daily duties? What does the Christ-life really look like when your days are gritty, long -- and sometimes even dark? How is God even here?'

In One Thousand Gifts, Ann invites you to embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative spiritual discipline of chronicling God's gifts. It's only in this expressing of gratitude for the life we already have, we discover the life we've always wanted--a life we can take, give thanks for, and break for others. We come to feel and know the impossible right down in our bones: we are wildly loved--by God. Let Ann's beautiful, heart-aching stories of the everyday give you a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace, a way of being present to God that makes you deeply happy, and a way of living that is finally fully alive. Come live the best dare of all!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (January 17, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310321913
• ISBN-13: 978-0310321910
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 6 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (446 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #62 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Christian Living
  • #29 in Books > Religion & Spirituality

More About the Author

Ann Voskamp is a bit of a mess.

She won a full-tuition scholarship to university and never finished. She married a Farmer and came home to gravel road and cornfields and had babies. A lot of them. Half a dozen. Her laundry basket is never empty. She loses library books. She homeschools their six beautifully exuberant kids and most days feel just a tad bit overwhelmed and very crazy.

She's the author of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Zondervan). And everyday, she's just wild enough to take the dare. Right in the midst of her own messy, gritty, grace-filled life.

When the kids and the washing machine sleep, she washes her real dirt down with words and The Word. Some of her words find themselves in an award-winning series for curious kids, A Child's Geography, of which all profits are donated to Compassion. Other words can be found at Laity Lodge's High Calling where she serves as a contributing editor, and other words advocate for the poor as she is a blogger traveling with Compassion.

The only words that really matter are the ones she lives. This convicts her. She clings to grace.

Everyday she writes about the mess and the grace and the everyday wonder at www.aholyexperience.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1,517 of 1,602 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Message Gets Lost in the Words, February 22, 2011

By 

Books and Chocolate - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Hardcover)

I think this is one of those reviews that I'm going to take some heat over because I know this book and the author are very popular in Christian circles right now. That's why I wanted to read it myself, because I had heard so much about it.

First, the positive. I know several bloggers who are sharing their own 1000 gifts/gratitude lists and I'm always blessed to read them. I have kept my own accounting of what I call "grace notes" for years so I understand the blessing of looking for things to be thankful for. Voskamp shares from her heart with stories about her family and her own spiritual journey, and I think anyone reading this book would come away with a heightened sense of looking for God's grace in daily life whether it be having one's child come through surgery or the admiring the beauty of a full moon. I appreciate the encouragement to live life fully right where we are without feeling we need to work through a "bucket list" of daring experiences or exotic locations before we can be fulfilled.

But, this was a difficult book for me to read. Voscamp is obviously a poet at heart but the entire book is sing-songy with long descriptions and awkward word phrases and metaphors that I found distracting. It doesn't read as someone would actually talk in real life conversation.

As an example: "...tonight over our farm will rise the Great Hexagon of the blazing winter stars - Sirius, Rigel, ruby Aldebran, Capella, the fiery Gemini twins, and Procyon, and in the center, scarlet Betelgeuse, the red supergiant larger than twice the size of earth's orbit around the sun - and I will embrace the skin of a boy child that my body grew from a seed. The low heavens outside the paned windows fill with more snowflakes than stars, no two-stacked crystals the same; the trees in the wood draw in collective green breath to the still of January hibernation, and God in the world with birth ice from His womb, frost of heaven, bind the chains of the Pleiades, loose the cords of Orion, and number again the strands on my head."

Those who like this kind of poetic narrative with mystical undertones will enjoy this book. Those who don't will likely struggle to find the message in the sea of words. For me, it was just too much page after page, and it took me a while to finish the book because I had to take it in small doses.

I was also wary of the mystical/contemplative spirituality/emergent church references, as she references those known to be mystics, panentheists, universalists, or New Age authors such as Brother Lawrence, Henri Nouwen, Annie Dillard, Brennan Manning, Sarah Ban Breathnach, Teresa of Avila, and Dallas Willard, among others. The influence of the teachings of these various authors is apparent in Voskamp's writing.

In addition, I was uncomfortable with the chapter on making love to Jesus in which the author speaks of seeking communion with God in what can only be termed as sexual language, taking it to a level that I personally don't believe scripture intends. Voskamp writes, "Mystical union. This, the highest degree of importance. God as Husband in sacred wedlock, bound together, body and soul, fed by His body, quenched by His blood . . . God, He has blessed - caressed. I could bless God - caress with thanks. It's our making love. God makes love with grace upon grace, every moment a making of His love for us. . . . couldn't I make love to God, making every moment love for Him? To know Him the way Adam knew Eve. Spirit skin to spirit skin. . . The intercourse of soul with God is the very climax of joy . . . To enter into Christ and Christ enter into us - to cohabit."

Scripture doesn't teach that our relationship with God is to be a sexual, orgasmic experience or that we are to know him the way Adam as husband knew Eve as his wife. Further, what are children and men supposed to do with the notion of making love to Jesus?

Despite the doctrinal and personal issues with this book, I tried to stay focused on what I felt the author's intended message of the book was: live fully and abundantly in daily life by being thankful for the gifts that come from God's grace, no matter how small. I am inspired to live more fully in this kind of gratitude.

This review is simply my opinion of what was actually in the book and not a reflection on the author herself, whom I do not know personally. Her writing style just doesn't appeal to me and I have to question some of the "theology" in the book which is why I recommend discernment when reading it.

127 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Baffled, March 22, 2011

By 

Amo - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Hardcover)

I am a little baffled by One Thousand Gifts. Baffled that everyone seems to love the book, baffled at the reviews, and baffled that I do not seem to be enjoying the book like I expected.

I have seen some major comment craziness over this book which causes me a little apprehension in sharing my thoughts because I don't particularly want to be stoned or have virtual banana peels throw my way. The truth is; however, I did not love it. I had to force myself to keep reading which having a review copy demanded.

Sure, I was touched by the sadness author Ann VosKamp has had to deal with and I wished it was not so for her. Plus, I think giving thanks to God is important; however, I found myself weighed down by her constant, poetical voice. It was hard to follow and taxing to read. Sometimes, I wanted her to say what she meant straight out and not make me search for the intended meaning nor be forced to reread sentences because of the unconventional wording. I personally feel that her prose works for short blog posts but not an entire book, and I wondered if the entire message of the book could be condensed into one or more blog posts that would have been just as encouraging.

As I was reading, there were sentences and sections that made me pause and want to line it up with truth. I wondered if in her manner, there were liberties taken. Just three of the parts that made me wonder were as follows:

"If clinging to His goodness is the highest form of prayer, then seeing His goodness with a pen, with the shutter, with a word of thanks, these really are the most sacred acts conceivable." (pg. 61) So, writing down or taking pictures of what you are thankful for is a sacred act and actually "the most sacred act conceivable"?

"Here is the only place I can love Him." (pg. 70) She can only love God when she writes her list?

"...discover how to make love to God." (pg. 201) When you use certain words and phrases, you think certain things (sex, not necessarily intimacy).

Perhaps these questions I had were because I was not enjoying the poetry in it all. I do understand that a new voice, a break from ordinary is refreshing and her fan base is solid. Based on bloggers I read and Tweets I am following the majority are devouring One Thousand Gifts.

I did not enjoy One Thousand Gifts, but I do like Ann VosKamp. I read her blog, Holy Experience, at times and sometimes, I link up. From my readings, I believe she loves God with all her heart and desires to serve Him; so none of that is in question here. Plus, despite the fact that the reading was laborious to me, I did close the book desiring to keep writing my list of thanks and wanting to see God's hand in all of my life, which was the purpose and goal of the book to be sure. Thanks to Ann, I have a list going that started long before her book and because of her blog.

One Thousand Gifts was given to me by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

337 of 369 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Left me undone, December 14, 2010

By 

Brooke McGlothlin - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are (Kindle Edition)

Anything but a light read, Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts; A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, has left me undone...only to be reformed by the Hand of my Master. Join me as I share a small piece of how the Savior has used it in my life.

Captured immediately by Ann's incredible gift of pen, I learned that life dealt her several seemingly cruel hands. The book begins with the story of the loss of Ann's sister, Aimee, who was literally crushed in front of her family by a trucker who simply didn't see her. As a mother of young children, the sheer angst of Ann's telling made me want to crawl in bed with my little ones and hold them close to me forever. A mother's heart wants to protect...and yet with raw authenticity Ann cracks open the question we all have asked at one time or another, "How can a good God..."

Her answer comes in what I found to be a most unlikely place. Thanksgiving.

I always thought of myself as a thankful person before reading this book. I know I have been blessed...or at least I can look at my life and see good things I call blessings...and they outnumber the bad things I call something else. But Ann made me think beyond my limitations...in fact urging me to put on a whole new set of eyes to see the deep thankfulness in both the good and the bad. A task not humanly possible.

But nothing is impossible with God. She calls it eucharisteo. And I admit to letting it roll off of my lips in those sacred moments of deep thanksgiving.

And so I began, with great excitement, counting my blessings with Ann. Little gratitudes found along the way. A soft little cheek here, a song lyric there...Before I knew what was happening, I began seeing thanksgiving in things I had overlooked for a lifetime. In a recent blog post, I wrote these words describing this new way of seeing:

"I'm seeing them EVERYWHERE of late...picture must needs! And me with no real camera! I'm eaten inside with the desire to capture the deep thanksgiving...the things the Lord seems to be doing just for me in the sky...with those clouds...and those mountains and when, tell me WHEN, did those mountains I've loved all my life begin looking so glorious in the fall? Someone MUST needs take a picture!"

Indeed...the Lord seems to have given me a new set of eyes. And rather than calling only the good the blessing, I now clearly see the radical, hard thanksgiving in the bad.

Though I say that with a hint of fear.

Because a part of me still lives in fear that if I invite God to bring me wholly into Him, great sacrifice...loss...will be required of me to get there. I know that in this world we will have troubles...and I know that suffering is means God uses to draw us unmistakably to Him. I know He can be trusted. I know He is good. But the fear remains. What if God must take something (someone?) from me to bring me to Him most fully? I cannot ask that of Him.

Angie Smith, at a recent conference said (paraphrased) about the loss of her infant daughter , Audrey Caroline, "for all that her death has brought me...the understanding of God, the opportunities to comfort others and show them God's grace...I would still rather have Audrey." And my heart nods in agreement. This describes the words of my heart.

Beautifully and fully, Ann weaves comfort to my fear when she says, "It is impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fear" (p. 203). And now I know the reason for the thanksgiving...the counting of the blessings...graces. So many times God calls us to remember and give thanks, for as we remember His good works, His salvation, His provisions, protection...we give thanks...and are built up, given peace and hope that He can do it again. Knowing this helps me take one step closer to the fullness of Him and realize it as an area where He continues to work.

His work is grace.

And I can not only count my gratitude, I can actually BE grace to those around me. "A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ" (p.184). And "to give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living" (p. 192).

I am not the same. Upside down in a right-side-up world and wanting to stay there. Seeking the thanksgivings of each day with a fully devoted heart knowing that I'll have to read it again...and probably again. So many are the thoughts of my heart right now...so many are the ways I feel challenged to look beyond circumstances for the thanksgiving in life. So fully have I decided to live in this dare of the right now...that all I have to say to Ann Voskamp (and to my Savior) is:

One Thousand Thank-You's friends.

Brooke McGlothlin, of A Life in Need of Change