One Thousand Gifts

After the third friend told me that One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp was a must read, I put it in my queue at the library.

Now I must say that the author is very poetic, which makes this a difficult read for me. I'm more of a "cut-to-the-chase" kind of girl! However, I was hooked by the second chapter when I read this:

"For years of mornings, I have woken wanting to die. Life itself twists into nightmare. For years, I have pulled the covers up over my head, dreading to begin another day I'd be bound to just wreck. Years, I lie listening to the taunt of names ringing off my interior walls, ones from the past that never drifted far and away: Loser, Mess, Failure. They are signs nailed overhead, nailed through me, naming me. The stars are blinking out.

Funny, this. Yesterday morning, the morning before, all these mornings, I wake to the discontent of life in my skin. I wake to self-hatred. To the wrestle to get it all done, the relentless anxiety that I am failing. Always, the failing. I yell at children, fester with bitterness, forget doctor appointments, lose library books, live selfishly, skip prayer, complain, go to bed too late, neglect cleaning the toilets. I live tired. Afraid. Anxious. Weary. Years, I feel it in the veins, the pulsing of ruptured hopes. Would I ever be enough, find enough, do enough? But this morning [she had a nightmare about dying of cancer], I wake wildly wanting to live. Physically feeling it in the veins trembling, the hard pant of the lungs, the seeing it in the steady stars, how much I really want to really live. How I don't want to die. Is that the message of nightmares and dreams? To live either fully alive...or in empty nothingness?

It's the in between that drives us mad.

It's the life in between, the days of walking lifeless, the years calloused and simply going through the hollow motions, the self-protecting by self-distracting, the body never waking, that's lost all capacity to fully feel--this is the life in between that makes us the wild walking dead."

Oh my! I have felt exactly like that. Dreading every day, wanting to pull the covers over my head, calling myself "loser, mess, failure" because I've once again yelled at a child, etc., etc.

Her answer to this is eucharisteo - thanksgiving. This is the Greek word used as "give thanks" in the Luke 22:19: "And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them..." Jesus did this the night before his crucifixion. And he knew what was coming.

Then she quotes Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy: "The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharitic world." In her words, "ingratitude was the fall--humanity's discontent with all that God freely gives." OUCH!

And then this part of chapter 3 reaches out to slap me: "Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall--discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied." I had to stop reading there last night because I needed to blog about what I'd read so far.

This morning I started the list. It will be hard for me to get to one thousand.

Read this book!