Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.
Ann VoskampRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the profound nature of trust, suggesting that divine sacrifice demonstrates the ultimate trustworthiness.
Ann Voskamp's quote emphasizes the idea that trust is not simply given but must be earned through actions. She argues that the sacrifices made, symbolized by the imagery of wounds and thorns, create a compelling case for why one should place their trust in God, as these acts represent profound love and commitment.
In practice
In a sermon about faith, this quote can be used to illustrate how divine love manifests in our lives.
Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.
Motherhood is a hallowed place because children arenβt commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.
I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on 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.
When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?
They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... God gives us time. And who has time for God? Which makes no sense.
But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for.
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.
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