One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are, Hardcover

Ann Voskamp is the wife of one fine, down-to-earth farmer; a book-reading mama to a posse of seven; and the author of the New York Times bestsellers One Thousand Gifts, which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into more than twenty-one languages, and The Broken Way.

Named by Christianity Today as one of fifty women most shaping culture and the church today, Ann knows unspoken brokenness and big country skies and an intimacy with God that touches wounded places. Millions do life with her at her daily photographic online journal, one of the top 10 most widely read Christian sites: www.annvoskamp.com.

Ann Voskamp is a writer with DaySpring (a division of Hallmark), a contributing editor to Laity Lodge’s The High Calling, and a global advocate for the poor traveling for Compassion International. With an educational background in psychology and education from York University and the University of Waterloo, Ann and her husband are farmers in the Mennonite countryside of southwestern Ontario, raising a half dozen kids, crops of corn, and the roof in praise. She writes every day about the everyday wonder every day at www.aholyexperience.com.

Just like you, Ann Voskamp hungers to live her one life well. Forget the bucket lists that have us escaping our everyday lives for exotic experiences. "How," Ann wondered, "do we find joy in the midst of deadlines, debt, drama, and daily duties? What does the Christ-life really look like when your days are gritty, long—and sometimes even dark? How is God even here?"

In One Thousand Gifts, Ann invites you to embrace everyday blessings and embark on the transformative spiritual discipline of chronicling God's gifts. It's only in this expressing of gratitude for the life we already have, we discover the life we've always wanted...a life we can take, give thanks for, and break for others. We come to feel and know the impossible right down in our bones: we are wildly loved - by God.

Let Ann's beautiful, heart-aching stories of the everyday give you a way of seeing that opens your eyes to ordinary amazing grace, a way of being present to God that makes you deeply happy, and a way of living that is finally fully alive.

Come live the best dare of all!

As long as giving thanks is possible, joy is possible, according to Ann Voskamp, in her book One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. She believes there is always something to give thanks for because God is constantly bestowing His grace on us.

The book begins with Voskamp's birth. She describes it abstractly with a poetic flourish, which to an inattentive reader works more as a maze than a picture. As the book continues, Voskamp writes of her discovery of eucharisteo – meaning gratefulness – and of her journey through chronicling a thousand gifts from God.

The journey is where the book speeds up. As Voskamp shares some of the gifts and the events surrounding how she attained them, the reader indwells the pages, sees the scenes described, and understands the lessons shared. As Voskamp compares God allowing pain in life to a surgeon cutting her son open in order to heal him, a now attentive reader sees as Voskamp sees, that "all is grace."

One Thousand Gifts is contemplative nonfiction with storytelling appeal. Voskamp's writing is flowery and poetic, so, if read quickly, it’s hard to understand. Sentence structure is shaky, with an overabundance of fragments and run-ons. The message is meaningful and worthwhile for believers having difficulty being joyful, but if readers will not slow down and pay close attention, the message will remain over their heads.

One Thousand Gifts is a worthwhile book to readers wishing to delve deeper into the practice of giving thanks to the Lord. For those who focus carefully on each word printed, its lessons will prove beneficial and, likely, by the time the last page is turned, the readers will be chronicling their own thousand gifts. I know I was. – Meredith Sell, www.ChristianBookPreviews.com

Ann Voskamp invites us to slow down, to learn how to live the full life of eucharisteo (with grace, thanksgiving, joy) regardless of circumstances. With lovely word pictures inspired by everyday life in her family and on her farm, she writes about her struggle to live joyfully amid sin and sorrow and suffering.