One Thousand Gifts (Wandering Thoughts on a Book)

"Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world." - Sarah Ban Breathnach

I've seen the gratitude lists people have made - mostly blogposts, not so frequently in day-to-day life. I've skimmed through them and thought they were nice, but I never considered creating one of my own. After all, I would end up halfheartedly writing the same things as everyone else: "A roof over my head. Family. Friends. Etc." The big things in life that I know I should be thankful for but always seem to take for granted. I don't freeze midday and just thrill through with thanksgiving over these things as I wonder, "Why me? Why do I get to experience this?"
And I think that's the first problem with my mindset towards gratitude lists. I look for the big things to write down that I should write down. In my prayers, I just gather everything up, every little crumb, in a nice packaged 'Thank you for everything', and that's the end.
But it's the little things that catch my eye throughout the day. It's the little things that cause me to freeze and thrill with unspoken thanksgiving. I am delighted by bugs and flowers and my garden and the sky and nature, but I still clump them all together into one big package when it's even the smaller things that make my heart sing. I don't necessarily always smile when I think about my garden. Sometimes I think about the gopher eating all my onions. Or the back breaking work of digging out potatoes or some other hard job.
But if I concentrate on the small things, then the small things reach out to me. It's not just my garden, it's the first pumpkin growing on its vine and the first watermelon. The honeybee who gets shot by a water droplet, and as I lift it off the wet ground, it shakes its wings off, and I feel the sprinkles hit my cheek. Or the silly stuff: my fuzzy blanket that never seems to be cold. The cup of hot chocolate I drank in the morning that somehow turned my grumps away. People who make me food.
It's these little things that make up the big things, and if I can't be thankful for them, how can I be thankful for anything and everything?
I never considered how keeping a list might change me, and I never considered it could be an act of worship and an essential part of a living faith. It's not the list. It's having a list to remind you to look around, to take note of things, to be present right where God is.
In One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp writes, "It's not the gifts that fulfill, but the holiness of the space. The God in it...This is supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in a moment...When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and holy. Here is the only place I can love Him"

And Ann goes on to write achingly real and poetical about her life and her struggles. Her fight for joy and thanksgiving and a full life. I reread sentence again and again and try to carve these words into my heart so I won't forget them, but the words are so many and so penetrating, and I am so forgetful.  I wish I could share all my highlighted lines from this book with you, but there are too many, and it's too late, and my words come out more and more rough and broken.

Read this book.

What do you think of gratitude lists? Have you kept one? Have you read One Thousand Gifts? What did you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

"The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks - take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks - and He miraculously makes it more than enough."