Ann Voskamp

Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.

When we can't bottle our tears up anymore, God catches every one in His bottle. God's catching every falling tear because He won't let us fall apart.

Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small - but we aren't sizes. We are souls. There are no better people or worse people - there are only God-made souls.

Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.

I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.

By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

My husband is Dutch, and his family, when you sat down to eat food at the table, you never left the table until you ate living bread and drank living water. They never left the table until they'd read Scripture together. So morning, lunch, suppertime, Scripture was always read at the table, and then there was prayer to close.

Get this, kids - how a man proposes isn't what makes him romantic. It's how a man purposes to lay down his life that makes him romantic.

Scales always lie. They don't make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.

Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But it's even more than that - Comparison makes you a thug who beats down somebody - or your soul.

Gratitude's not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I've spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.