Today’s Prayer to Passage is from the book ‘One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are’ by Ann Voskamp

Today I pray, “Dear God, we humans give thanks for so many gifts. Appreciation enhances cooperation. For what are You thankful today? Amen.”

I centered my thoughts with the book in my hands and opened it to this passage of deepest gratitude:

“Can there be a good God?
A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins?

Where is God, really?

How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind?
Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away?

Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt?

How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places?

How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy? Self-focus for God-communion.
To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal. It is possible, wildly.

I now see and testify.

So this story— my story.

A dare to an emptier, fuller life.”
—ANN VOSKAMP

This is God’s gloriously poetic thank you for loving despite the absence of love, sticking around when grace seems to have vanished, and remaining faithful when categories of faith are faltering. God thanks us deeply for our grace, our eternal love, and our honor. This was the only way it could be expressed, within literature, today. And for this, God says thank you to writers.