Gratitude and Trust

When I first started reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, I really didn't think I would end up finishing it.  She writes very poetically, and I am not a very poetic person.  I really struggled to make it through the first few chapters.  However, this past week has definitely been the turning point for me.  I find myself being drawn back to this book every time I have a few moments free.  For those of you who haven't heard of the book, it is about a woman's journey into living a life of gratitude.  She began keeping a journal of things she is grateful for...gifts from God that she was intentionally looking for throughout her day.  She eventually chronicled 1000 of them, and has just continued on.

The reason the book has become so much more of a friend to me this week is because I made it to the chapter where she really talks a lot about her struggles with fear and anxiety.  She talks about fearing the future and whether or not God will provide for her family as the economy takes a turn for the worse.  She shares her struggles with a diagnosed anxiety disorder.  She shares her questions about why, if God is good, there are so many events in life that are not good.  She asks hard questions about really tough suffering that she, her family, and her friends have struggled through.  Reading her thoughts about this couldn't have come at a more perfect time for me!

One conclusion she came to is that gratitude and trust cannot be separated.  We will not trust God if we cannot look back and see how He's been faithful in the past.  The more we live gratefully, recognizing His gifts moment-by-moment, the more we will trust His faithfulness and goodness toward us in the future.  That makes so much sense to me.  Not that God really owes me a list of references or anything...but that is what keeping a record of His gifts would be like for me.  It's something to look back on a be reminded of---in this fallen, sinful world where suffering indeed exists, He has given me so many more gifts that I could have ever deserved.  He has provided when I doubted that He would.  Being intentional about looking for and recording His gifts to me could establish in my forgetful heart a pattern of His faithfulness and goodness...teaching me His character, what He is really like.

Here are a few more little tidbits from the book....my favorites that I want to remember:

...she's talking about hard situations of deep suffering...."Remember and give thanks?  For what?  What if remembering doesn't kindle gratitude?  What if remembering just leaves third-degree burns?....In the wait, memories blister.  And in the still, Spirit comes and He whispers a name.  Christ.  And I see a world through His lens:  'He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?' (Romans 8:32).  He gave us Jesus.  Jesus!  Gave Him up for us all.  If we have only one memory, isn't this one enough?  Why is this the memory I most often take for granted? He cut open the flesh of the God-Man and let the blood.  He washed our grime with the bloody grace.  He drove the iron ore through His own vein.  Doesn't that memory alone suffice?  Need there be anything more?  If God didn't withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?  If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips?  How will He not also graciously give us all things He deems best and right?  He has already given the incomprehensible." (pg. 154)

"Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie...sometimes we don't fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good--until we have the perspective of years.  In time, years, dust settles.  In memory, ages, God emerges." (pg. 156)

"There is no joy without trust...'For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ' (2 Corinthians 1:20).  Yes in Christ!  To the Enfleshed Yes who said yes to this moment and yes to last year's illness and yes to the cracks of my childhood and yes to the nail and yes to my name in the Book of Life, hear me say YES!  Not 'I'm worried.'  Not, 'I'm stressed out.'  Not 'I'm anxious.'  Not 'I'm too afraid.'  Hear me say thank you.  Hear me say YES!  Watch me live a life of yes.  To all that was and is and is to come.  The power of sin and death and fear-sent-from-Enemy are forever ended because we can trust in the bridge even if it's caving, in God even when it's black, in manna-nourishment even when we don't know what it is.  The God whom we thank for fulfilling the promises of the past will fulfill His promises again.  In Christ, the answer to the questions of every moment is always Yes.  The answer is always YES!"  (pg. 159)

Now, I don't feel quite as much passionate trust as she exemplied in that last quote...but I am praying that by God's grace and through the continued work of the Spirit within me I will!