When I picked up One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp, I was expecting a book similar to many others I read throughout the year: a Christian self-help book with identifiable steps teaching me to be more grateful for things like dirty dishes in the sink, toilets to scrub and runny noses.
Voskamp’s New York Times bestseller reads nothing like this. The book is a beautiful, sometimes painful look into her life on a farm in the Mennonite countryside of Ontario, where Voskamp says she and her husband raise “half a dozen kids, crops of corn, and the roof in praise.”
The author begins searching the scripture to find what Jesus counted as important when he had less than twelve hours to live. “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them…” (Luke 22:19 NIV). She asks the question: Does giving thanks offer the fullest life? It is upon making that discovery in scripture, and searching for the meaning in the original language of “eucharisteo,” (he gave thanks), Voskamp begins the spiritual discipline of chronicling 1,000 gifts found in everyday life.
Her style of writing is close to poetic. She has a wonderful way of describing the everyday, mundane and transforming it into a thing of beauty that the reader is also then able to picture. This is not a book to be devoured quickly, the reader will want to read and re-read, giving Voskamp’s musings time to sink in and make sense.
I found myself also training my eye to see the everydayness and turning it into thanksgiving as I read along.
Voskamp’s website www.onethousandgifts.com invites her readers to join her and count the gifts in community. There is also a free app for phones that allows you to chronicle gifts as you discover them and has a daily quote from the book.
If you want to read a book that changes the way you see the everdayness of life, and challenges you to “give thanks in all things,” then I would recommend One Thousand Gifts.
Do you have a book to recommend? Let us know what’s on your “Top Ten List” of books to read for 2012.
Be watching for upcoming articles on getting organized with Gena and cooking with Sara!
(Dana serves on the Keepers Team as Assistant Website Editor. Her hobbies are reading, scrapbooking and taking long nature walks with her husband and three children.)
I have this book on my kindle and it is taking me a while to get through, but this is a good reminder that it is worth it! I agree that her writing is unique ut very thought–provoking! Thanks!