You Make Me Brave

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp changed my life. I mean, I don’t want to be too dramatic, it was not overnight. Not immediate, but to hear someone who feels as deeply as she, who wrestles as profoundly as she and could turn and give thanks in the hard, in the ugly, in the ugly beautiful. I felt a kinship with those deep emotions and how anger can be like a prowling lion. I felt like I had come to expect suffering, so I wasn’t surprised when it came, but I was not in the practice of giving thanks for it.

At first, I just started breathing like Ann had talked about. Breath in (whatever the moment holds) and breath out (and say thanks). Sounds simple and yet so profound. So, I started doing this mostly in the day-to-day with my kids. Sam (3) is screaming about the sausage that I just put on his plate because seconds ago when he asked for it, he didn’t mean it and this is all wrong. These are the moments for me, people. The moments I knew would come. The moments I want to run screaming from my home and just let someone else enter in. Are these the moments I’m supposed to give thanks for? So, I breathe out, Thank you Lord for the opportunity to love Sam even this moment. I invite you to take over. Because they are killing me.

“I look for the ugly beautiful, count it as grace, transfigure the mess into joy with thanks and eucharisteo leaves the paper, finds way to the eyes, the lips.” 1 Yes. Finds its way to the lips, so we are not whining or screaming in the hard, we are thanking. Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle.” And I could not relate more.

“I know it well after a day smattered with rowdiness and won a bit ragged with bickering, that I may feel disappointment and the despair may flood high, but to give thanks is an action and is a verb and these are not mere pulsing emotions. While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.”

The joy for me has come in the doing. My sister bought a beautiful journal from Anthropologie, perfect size for this endeavor. (Rifle Paper Company, Botanicals Notebook Collection) In May of 2012 at my sister’s bachelorette weekend in Sonoma, I started writing things I was thankful for, Cool mornings, A good book to read, mightiness of golden gate bridge, gruyere cheese, laughing until your sides hurt, giving surprise gifts, lingering over a cup of coffee, pasta with asparagus, sweet pea and mint pesto, hot tub, spontaneous dance party, uninterrupted shower, hot water . . .

I am so good at this. (Laughter) I would randomly write things down when I felt thankful and I filled up a few pages. I wrote several things down when the twins were close to arriving and then a few things when they did arrive.

Sour milk in the neck creases, Crew’s contented milk moan, friends bringing meals, night nanny (she stayed four weeks, I cried a lot when she walked out my door for the last time), the best blog post I’ve ever read on mothering the day the twins arrived.

Then the ugly beautiful that came in October (the twins were four months old): Salsa spraying in my eye after it dropped from the refrigerator to the floor, smoke in the house from an over-microwaved taquito (husband the culprit and hate the campfire smell), sore throat, the overwhelming need of 5 children, Sam’s screaming, Kate’s defiance, plugged ducts, chubby belly, mosquitos.

And in 2014 I printed off the Joy Dare Collection, every month, and embraced the challenge of counting 1,000 gifts. Each day would was numbered and had three prompts. Three things orange. Something wooden, wire and mesh. Something wooly, soft, woven. It wasn’t perfect. I would sometimes do a whole week at a time because I had forgotten to write each day. Sometimes two. I didn’t finish September and wrote nothing in October. I almost did the whole month of November, but stopped after Thanksgiving and wrote nothing in December. So, this year, I’m going for it, start to finish. Nobody said it had to be perfect. I still have 921 gifts to look back on in 2014 and be thankful. I felt challenged by Kara Tippett’s story of grace.2 I cried when I heard she died. Cried thinking of her sweet husband and four children who were missing her terribly. Then smiled through the tears thinking about her dancing in a new body in heaven. I loved what Ann wrote about her and my favorite quote, “Dying doesn’t have to be a tragedy, if we avoided the tragedy of living for the wrong things.” Then my mind quickly went to my sweet friend, Jen, with a similar story. She has metastatic breast cancer and just received news that the trial drug that she has been on at MD Anderson has stabilized her metastatic disease in her liver and bones, but her right breast (where the cancer started) has blown up like a water balloon. So, we were talking after church on Sunday. I gave her a hug. She said, I think He’s calling me home. I nodded and looked up at her with a tear running down my cheek and I said, I think so, too, but I don’t want you to go. And in the next moment, I look over at my three year old son who has pulled his shorts down to his ankles. Jen goes “Oh yes, every day, these are my people!” I just laughed. And ya’ll, I let him pee in the landscaping of the church. We go to a church with 10, 000 people, I mean there were probably closer to 3,000 at this service, but the risk was that we could trek all the way in to the church building, without my daughter knowing where we went and my husband and oldest daughter are coming out to meet us and we are not there, and he may not make it anyway, so I let him go. There was a two foot wall about 5 feet in front of him and I protected him from the back. It took me half a second to process and 8 long seconds for him to finish. See, I really have become that mom. It’s survival. I don’t know how else to explain it.