Quotessence
Home / Authors / Ann Voskamp Books
Ann Voskamp

Ann Voskamp Books

Author

Related Quotes

“Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.”

Trust
Book:One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Create image

“Jesus is not merely useful; He's ultimately beautiful. When I see Jesus as merely useful, it's tempting to want to make Him move my world. When I see He's beautiful, it's the heart that's moved, and this begins to change my world. When Jesus is only useful, He's a gadget or pill to make life better. But when Jesus is seen as truly beautiful, He's a joy that makes us live better...love better.”

BeautifulJoyJesusChange The WorldUseful
Book:The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life
Create image

“How in the name of all things good does God work for us and keep us safe when the dreaded phone call detonates, or the shrapnel of shame shreds everything that looks like hope, or the sky lashes round and swallows your dreams whole, or the claw of death guts deep, and how do you stagger forward hiding your bloody entrails? Evil hisses that if God really is love, then we better get roads without any suffering. And we shake off the lie and crush it with truth: Because God really is love, then we get roads with Him, and because God really is love, we are always soul-safe”

GodPainSuffering
Book:WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of
Create image

“And this peace sacrifice, it is actually eaten by those who sacrifice it, almost like a shared meal, almost like a feast between man and God [...]’ ‘Wait—’ I interrupt the guide, touch his shoulder before he moves on. ‘Sacrifice—doesn’t mean give up or lay down or go without or let go of?’ ‘No, no, no….Sacrifice doesn’t mean that at all. Sacrifice in Hebrew is korban.’ Aerie flips the pages of his worn bible to show me. ‘See. Sacrifice, korban, comes from the Hebrew root, K-R-V, which literally means to come near, an approach, a moving closer, to move into a closer relationship.’ Sacrifice is not losing something but moving closer to Someone. Sacrifice isn’t about loss—sacrifice is about love. Surrender to love. Sacrifice is about detaching from one thing—to attach to a greater thing.”

LossSacrifice
Book:WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of
Create image

“It was 1993. I was eighteen years old when I walked into my first therapy appointment in a stifling hot upstairs office with one window, no air conditioner, to see a counselor with teased bangs and a frizzy bleached perm. Mama had just signed herself into a psychiatric ward for the fourth extended treatment, each months long at a time. Dad had fallen into a vortex of depression [...] I tell myself this, try to believe this: no past can earmark you when you’ve heard the divine whisper of who you can still become.”

BecomingPast Trauma
Book:WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of
Create image

“I wonder if all the bad brokenness in the world begins with the act of forgetting - forgetting God is enough, forgetting what He gives is good enough, forgetting there's always more than enough and that we can live into an intimate communion. Forgetting is kin to fear. Whenever I forget, fear walks in. We're called to be a people known by our remembering - a remembering people. Forget to give thanks - and you forget who God is. Forget to break and give - and it's your soul that gets broken. Forget to live into...communion - and you end up living into a union of emptiness. If all our bad brokenness begins with an act of forgetting, then doesn't the act of remembering, then making Christ present by being broken and given, doesn't that lead to...communion, which literally re-members us? Everything He embodied in the Last Supper - it is what would heal the body's brokenness. Brokenness can be healed in re-membering, Remembering our union, our communion...with Christ. Re-membering heals brokenness.”

FearHealCommunionRememberingLast Supper
Book:The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life
Create image

“But the irony: Don't I often want to desperately wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness--I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image?”

WonderAweGod Life
Book:One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Create image

“Marriage and adoption have legal implications, but they are more than only a legal reality. Marriage and adoption are meant to be a lived reality, a lived attachment [...] ‘But the marriage is for the sake of a life together, and the adoption proceedings’ for a life together. And it’s true too: from the moment I first held her photograph and looked into Shiloh’s eyes under that starry Texas sky, I knew she was mine and I’d die for her. She was sealed in my heart as mine long before my hand signed on any dotted line.”

MarriageAdoptionLiving Together
Book:WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of
Create image

“And the earth under your feet, the rain over your face upturned, the stars spinning all around you in the brazen glory: this is for you, you, you. These are for you-gifts-these are for you-grace-these are for you-God, so count the ways He loves, a thousand, more, never stop, that when you wake in the morning you can't help turn humbly to the east, unfold your hand to the heavens, and though you tremble and though you wonder, though the world is ugly, it is beautiful, and you can slow and you can trust and you can receive each moment as grace.”

WorldWayMomentsHelpingHandsEarthBeautifulFacesTurnsHeavenStarsWonderMorningGraceFeetThousandGloryRainUglyEastOver YouYour FaceSpinningBrazen
Author:Ann Voskamp
Create image

“We're not giving what we're called to give, unless that giving affects how we live - affects what we put on our plate and where we make our home and hang our hat and what kind of threads we've got to have on our back. Surplus Giving is the leftover you can afford to give; Sacrificial Giving is the love gift that changes how you live - because the love of Christ has changed you. God doesn't want your leftovers. God wants your love overtures, your first-overs, because He is your first love.”

WantGivingFirstsKindHomeChristChangedHatsOver YouThreadPlatesFirst LoveSurplusLeftovers
Author:Ann Voskamp
Create image