bare beauty

The garden smells pungent and green and alive. The light’s warm. The loamy tilth of the soil lies loose, open, expectant. I walk the rows and all the weight of everything falls away and I know the the bare beauty of who He made me to be.

Ann Voskamp

a thousand

Egyptians have fifty words for sand, and Eskimos, a hundred for snow.

How to find a thousand words for the joy of all this grace we walk in?

Ann Voskamp

green space

God gives green space to the Mamas needing heart space.
Ann Voskamp

prayers

The prayers we weave into the matching of socks, the stirring of oatmeal, the reading of stories, they survive fire.
Ann Voskamp

kindness

Ours are the hands through which he works
Ours are the feet on which he moves
Ours are the voices through which he speaks
To this world with kindness

Written by Brian McLaren
Performed by Steve Bell

hurry

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgement and effort to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.
Ann Voskamp

beauty

I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep."
Ann Voskamp

time

They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... 

God gives us time. And who has time for God? 

Which makes no sense.

Ann Voskamp

vision

Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.
Kathleen Norris

altered

For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us places where we didn't know we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
Kathleen Norris (Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life)

ordinary

The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.
Kathleen Norris

made-to-order

If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.
Kathleen Norris

changed

Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine.
Kathleen Norris

rewritten

As gentle as feathers
The snow piles high
Our world gets rewritten and retraced every time
Like fresh plates and clean slates
Our future is white
New Years resolutions are reset tonight


Lyrics by Sleeping At Last - Snow

trust

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Corrie ten Boom

dust

Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

Lyrics by Gungor - from You Make Beautiful Things

poignant

If you're listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break, it's purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonder.
Andrew Harvey

free-form

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.)
Donald Miller

ghosts

The branches have traded
Their leaves for white sleeves
All warm blooded creatures make ghosts as they breathe
Scarves are wrapped tightly like gifts under trees

Lyrics by Sleeping At Last - Snow

counts

It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.
Corrie Ten Boom