Ann Voskamp

Second in the ongoing series of influential contemporary writers

If I’d been thinking more critically, I might never have taken a second look at One Thousand Gifts. I saw it reviewed on Goodreads -- three of five stars. (A good review, or a “meh -- decent but not exciting” review?) But I took it as good, and looked it up on Amazon. And the preview got me.  Thanking God might be a dull concept, something I already know about, right? But it's hardly going to be a book of platitudes when the writer describes mourning the death of her sister in childhood, If she learns to thank God after that, she might have a story to tell. So I purchased the book to read on another trip to Uganda, and started reading it on the first long flight (Detroit to Amsterdam). On the one hand the concept still seemed routine, and the examples seemed repetitious. Surely one could easily complete a list of 1000 gifts in one sitting if you concentrated. Thanking God for every atom in your body would get you into the billions times billions.

But the book also got me thinking deeper, looking beyond the immediate. We had bulkhead seats, so I looked at the airplane door just in front of us. How detailed the manufacturing must be, and how often the air seal must be tested, for it to feel so routine to be flying through the air with an unbreathable and lethally cold near-vacuum just outside.

I reread it again on another trip to Uganda. Voskamp’s struggles with the meaning of her name, “Ann” meaning full of grace, and feeling she lacks grace resonates with me. I take up my list I’d started of named gifts and decide to continue. Restarting the list opens my eyes anew to the wonders around me -- renewed wonder at colors, and shapes. It is this world, and none other, that God has made, and it is good. God surely loves details, for he’s made so many of them.

Another significant thing I learned is to give thanks even for hard things. She writes of Jesus giving thanks for the bread at the Last Supper, thanking even for the suffering he will endure.

I realize too there is something old and familiar in Voskamp’s message. Back in 1975, I’d appreciated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounting his discovery of God in his Gulag years. “I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison for having been in my life.’” So thank you, Ann Voskamp, for reminding me to thank.

The joy of the Lord is my strength

For years this was one of those clichés I knew but didn't really believe or think about. One of those texts printed on plaques and posters, vaguely soothing because it's familiar.

Then I discovered the paradox; how one could examine the promises of God, and also examine the messy circumstances of our lives, even if the two were in contrast there was hope as I cried out to God to fulfill his promises in my here and now. And I began experiencing a lot more joy than I'd been used to. This familiar but not understood phrase began to mean something. There is joy, and getting it, living in it enables you to cope with a lot. Like I wrote in the book, joy is like an emotional oven mitt. Open your heart to joy and it protects you from feeling burned by life.

Two days ago, I came across this verse in its context. Nehemiah 8:10. The people of Jerusalem have gathered together and Ezra the scribe is reading the law out loud. Many people are mourning, probably thinking of all the ways they had not kept the law. Nehemiah says don't mourn, rejoice, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. So even then, under the Law, there is grace. Don't be discouraged by what you have done or not done, rejoice that God is at work in you. How much more can we rejoice that God is in us, knowing Jesus has come and brought the New Covenant to us.

Lisa McKay Wolfe

I'm starting a new series of posts on writers I admire. 

In 2009 I saw My Hands Came Away Red, on our library’s new fiction shelf. I read the blurb and grabbed it, because it seemed different than the standard template for Christian novels: Protagonist far from God, life falls apart, comes to faith and life comes back together. I read it and loved how the heroine has hope without the standard “happy ending” – her teen mission trip ended in disaster, she still feels underwater but trusts she is rising.

I recommended it to my wife, then we recommended it to our church book club, who also liked it. It reminded me of the little known novel by Elisabeth Elliot No Graven Image. It too is a tale of a missionary effort ending in disaster where the heroine comes to find her worth in God, not in her missionary success.

 I've written about my love/hate relationship with the typical evangelical happy ending (first time, second time). My conclusion, Christian stories should have a happy middle -- we're still in a mess but we have hope in the mess. The conflict between God's promises and our actual circumstances drives us to prayer, and out of prayer comes calmness and peace. The image of Cori underwater, but rising, continues to evoke this concept.

In 2012 I started following the Lisa McKay blog, the struggles of expatriate life in Asia has a familiar tone. When Love at the Speed of Email comes out, I order a copy, among several books I picked to stock up of my Nook for three weeks in Uganda. On the way to Uganda, we sample the delights of our newest favorite place in Europe, the KLM elite lounge in Amsterdam; free food and drinks, and one last hour of free Internet access before Uganda where we have to pay by the megabyte to connect. One last chance to play a Facebook game, but I didn’t linger there very long. What else to check out while I have free access? I thought of Lisa’s blog – was there an update about her broken foot? I go there, and read about another medical hardship --husband Mike needs back surgery immobilizing him for a month. Then she writes about Romans 8 “All things work together for good.” The verse makes her angry, but also gives her delightful hope.

 “Yes!” I say in my heart, “She’s got it.” The promises are disappointing when we want instant results, but bring hope for long term needs. That’s why I wrote a book about Jeremiah’s promises of the New Covenant but kept it from having a typical evangelical happy ending, and why I titled it “Covenant of Hope.” That’s why I elaborated a doctrine I’ve called “Faith and Reality”, or “Faith and Circumstances;”  how we should scrutinize with great attention the promises of God and at the same time scrutinize with great attention the circumstances of our lives, and accept that tension between the two happens all the time.

So maybe I hadn’t been crazy to put Lisa McKay on my list of influential women writers after only one novel. And on the flight to Uganda, I dove right in to“Love at the Speed of Email” and was impressed with her thoughtful mind and her emotional honesty. And what better place to read Love at the Speed of Email than on an international flight?

Lisa got it again in writing about an informational banquet about the sex trade. How dare she worry about what to wear and enjoy the rich dessert so much when so many are suffering? And yet that is too easy a drama to make the story about. She highlights one statement from the presentation: “hope chases us,” and realizes that is the message, not hopelessness and cynicism because one is unable to fundamentally change societies to end this plague, but that individuals can find hope in their circumstances and choose to change, and other individuals can find hope in seeking to help other individuals. Husband Mike gets it too, rejoicing one afternoon in joy, a respite from the usual struggles of being viewed as a living vending machine or seeing suffering that you cannot begin to cure.

 So here’s to Lisa McKay Wolfe, one of the founding mothers of the league of women that now dominate my Feedly feed, holding up the gospel of the happy middle, that real life is complicated and messy, yet God is with us in it and we can find hope and joy.

What I wish I'd learned while I was single

Before meeting my wife, I had several lonely years. The loneliness was painful and I didn't know how to deal with it. When I look back on those years, I wish I could have understood that to feel loneliness is not a sign of failure. Sometimes I felt my faith had failed. Should I feel alone while "walking with Jesus?" Sometimes I felt God had failed me, when yet another potential romance ended. I knew I was timid in potential relationships, but I felt I had reached out, so why hadn't one of those worked?

If I could go back in time, I'd tell my earlier self to read Psalm 22; and realize it is not just a prediction of Jesus' suffering on the cross, but a real moment in David's life when he felt alone and cried out to God. He was not losing his faith, he was faithfully presenting to God his feelings of loneliness. God is with us, even when we don't have what we want, even when what we want is a good thing.

Dogs and the love of God

We said goodbye to our dog of eleven years back in June. These last two months two friends shared their grief at saying goodbye to a beloved canine. In the back of my mind I've had this thought that mourning a dog was excessive. "Just a dog, after all." But recently the thought came to me that people who mourn for their dogs are echoing the love of God. God loves us, gets emotional about us, and no angel dare say: "Why such a big deal. Just a human!"

I have another dog memory -- before Happy (2001 to 2013) we had Didi in the 90's. Didi was very affectionate, sometimes annoyingly so. We could never teach her not to jump up on us when we came home from the office. We'd come home, she'd bound forward to meet us, and jump on us with her eyes gleaming with happiness that we were home, and we'd say "No, no, down, Didi." Day after day. But I saw that her jumping was her expression of affection for us, that our coming home was the high point of her day. And my annoyance at being jumped on again would fade.

I was patient with Didi because I focused on her love for me, not on her failing to learn how I wanted to be loved. Much greater is the Father's love -- patient with us in our imperfections, loving us even when we do not love him.

The Happy Middle

A while back I wrote about my dislike evangelical stories with trite happy endings. Stories where the protagonist doesn't know God or has walked away from God, goes through crisis after crisis until they come or come back to faith, then all their life comes together smoothly, better than ever before. I don't like these stories because I don't think they're true.

But there is a paradox. How can a story about the Gospel not have a happy ending? The Gospel is the mother of all happy endings. We were dead in our sins, now in Christ we are alive.

But most often in this life, we have to wait for the fulfillment of all God has promised us. For now, uncertainties and personal messes continue. We have only the promise that it will get better, while our present is still messy, complicated and awkward. 

Most stories in this life have a happy middle. People cry out to God in pain or difficulty, God doesn’t remove the pain or difficulty, but the people find hope in his promises. The seeming contradiction between the promises and their circumstances drives them to prayer, and out of prayer comes calmness and peace. I call it a middle, because one looks forward to God fulfilling the promises in a greater way. But it is happy, because in that way beyond human understanding, knowing the promise brings assurance, even when it is not yet fulfilled. Blogger Addie Zierman calls it the "hard, beautiful middle of faith." 

Actually I've felt the happy middle concept for years, without putting a name to it. My two favorite novels, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle and Cancer Ward both featured a happy middle. In the first, Gleb Nerzhin leaves the almost paradise of the special camp for an ordinary camp, but is at peace because he feels he has done the right thing. In the second, Oleg Kostoglotov leaves the hospital, his cancer largely cured, but not necessarily totally; but he still has exile and gives up hope in either of his two love interests from the hospital, but he too is at peace with himself. 

Philosophy and Scripture

Philosophy strikes me as thinking like a detective in a mystery --or maybe more like a geologist. You see a complex, intricate structure. How did it come to be? You figure out how impersonal forces could have acted to produce it.

But Scripture assumes another kind of mystery. A great powerful and loving being that we cannot see, hear or feel (except in rare moments) follows an intricate plan. He has shown us the overall character of this plan, but He doesn't show us the details. And our task is to hold onto what He tells us about His nature and the goodness of the plan, when we cannot figure it out and are tempted to believe there is no plan, only chaos.