Radical Gratitude with Ann Voskamp
I don't know if anybody has shaped my view and honestly our generation's view of gratitude more than Ann Voskamp has with her words and with her life. If you don't know, Ann and I are really good friends. I mean really good friends. It's not a public-facing friendship. It is a private, dirt under your fingernails, which is our constant language with each other, kind of friendship. She was beside me from the first minute that I thought of IF:Gathering, and through these years we've adopted children, we've watched God change lives around us, and we've also watched God change our lives.
I want to talk gratitude with Ann because it is such a passion of hers. So I started there. Why has gratitude become the subject that she is closest to and what she preaches with her life?
”I think it’s because I'm so bad at it! I was raised in a home of non-believers. My father is a perfectionist to the nth degree, and nothing is ever good enough for him and what he does in his life. And he raised all of us kids that we had to work harder and push harder. So when you’re raised with sort of a perfectionistic kind of mindset, that's sort of like the opposite in every sense of gratitude.
Then I met my good husband who was raised in such a Bible-believing home, and I got saved through Good News Bible Club that his mama ran with Child Evangelism Fellowship. And I was so struck by his father who punctuated literally every sentence with, ‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord’. And he still does it to this day, which was such a mind shift for me, a complete paradigm shift to live in a posture of gratitude all of the time. And then marrying Darryl, he is such a man of gratitude. I remember we were in a Bible study, and they had an icebreaker. We were each supposed to write down our pet peeve and then mix all the notes up and pull them out of a hat. Then we read what was on the sheet and said who we thought it was. And my husband wrote on his little slip of paper that his pet peeve was people that weren't grateful. He has taught me so much.
I think we write about the things that we're trying to work out in our own lives. We write about the things that God wants to do the deep work in us. And I think, for me, writing so much about gratitude and gratefulness was about me working through my own perfectionism and me trying to shift my perspective for things weren't good enough, I wasn't good enough, seeing the one blot on a white page as opposed to focusing on the white page and all that is good.
It's God doing deep work in me, and my husband having deep patience with me so that I could shift my perspective from seeing all that was wrong, to seeing what is good and true and pure and right so that I could see that God's hand is present in all of these things. I can honestly say post-writing One Thousand Gifts, that entitlement has been the worst thing that has ever happened to me. That when I've had an attitude of entitlement, I have ripped relationships and done deep damage in my own soul. So that saying that post-One Thousand Gifts, to confess that and say that gratitude isn't a one time thing. It is a posture of life. It's a way to walk and live constantly. It's not something we check off our list and say, ‘I've got that now under my belt and I'm done with that’. It is a daily walking in gratefulness as the road changes ahead of you and as things get harder or the road gets deeper in some ways - how now can I still give thanks in this knowing that God is sovereign and He is good and He's working all things for good. So I can give thanks in everything.”
Next I wanted to talk with Ann about the discipline of gratitude because anyone who has read her books or heard her stories knows that this gratitude for her comes from darkness. There were plenty of reasons to not be grateful, and yet God gave her this vision to live a different way, and I know that comes through discipline. It’s something she chooses every day.
“Feelings often don't tell us the facts of things. Our emotions, we are supposed to feel them, but then the emotion is to move us to God. So I think we feel our feelings, but then we need to have our own spiritual disciplines and habits day in and day out that ground us and root us in the truth of who God is and change our perspective. And it's something tiny.
I am still writing out two lists every day: a gratefulness list and a given this list. So we get to the end of every day, and I try to write out 10 things that I am grateful for every day. And I think it's really tempting sometimes to write out the big things, ‘I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful to live in this country. I'm thankful for my salvation in Christ’. Those are all right and true and good. But I think the real deep work starts to happen when you can give thanks for the smallest things and be attentive to and notice small things in your life. So can you write down 10 things every day? 5 things every day? 3 things every day? Because what that does is start to shift your perspective throughout the day to notice these small moments, God in the moment, and write those down.
And then I have a given this list, and I write out the ways that I took the grace and the goodness and the kindness of the Lord that I've been given and how did I pass that on? How did I live broken and give a gift back out into the world? And that list is always far shorter than the list of gratefulness. All the ways that He has been good to me. So I really believe that at the crux of everything, how do we live a cruciform life, a life that is shaped like the cross, shaped like the life of Jesus? You need to live that vertical beam of God gives things to me, the grace has come down, and then how does my thanks rise back to Him? And then how do I then stretch out the horizontal beams of the cross and give that grace on? Because I think what happens is when we live a life of gratitude, a daily practice of gratitude, we start to see that we move from this myth of scarcity, that ‘I don't have enough in my life’ to start to see that, ‘Oh wow, look at this abundance I am living in, of all of the grace and goodness and gifts that the Lord has given me’ that now I can't keep them to myself. It moves you from contemplating the goodness of God, to now being an activist passing the grace and goodness of God out into a broken world that needs the Shalom and goodness of God. So sometimes we think of gratitude as something that is really sort of self centered and narcissistic in some way. We're just focused on all of the things that we've been given. But I think when we really work that down into our life, we see if we've been given so much, that we are Esthers in the palace for such a time as now to pass those gifts on out into the world.
And we model it to our kids. Every evening when I start my gratefulness list, I'll do it with Shiloh, and she gets so frustrated with me because I start to think of it, ‘Oh, and I'm grateful for this and Shiloh, what else are we grateful for?’ and she’ll go, ‘mama, mama, it's my turn, it's my turn!’ But to model to our kids that there is so much to be grateful for and to move that attitude from entitlement, that we need more. Because I mean, honestly, incoming all the time in terms of advertisements and everything around us is, ‘you need more, you need more, you need to be more, you need to get more, you need to consume more,’ and we need to shift that. There's so much goodness that God has given me.
It's been really interesting because next year, it'll be the 10th anniversary of One Thousand Gifts. Levi is our third son, our fourth child who is now, he turns 19 this December and one of the other kids told me, ‘Hey, did you know that Levi's reading One Thousand Gifts right now?’
And so when he came in from barn chores the next morning I said, ‘Hey, somebody told me you're reading One Thousand Gifts?’
And he smiled and said, ‘Well, mom, I realized that I really had a discontented spirit and I wanted to change my heart to have a grateful heart. And I thought, what book would teach me more about gratitude than One Thousand Gifts?’ And he said, ‘I've been writing out a grateful list every single night, mom’.
So I think whether you're 4 or 94, gratitude shifts our perspective. Joy is a function of gratitude, and gratitude is a function of perspective. So I don't need to change my life so much as I need to change my perspective to see all of the good and the goodness. Because lots of times we think, ‘I will be grateful when I can see all of the things that I'm happy about’. But lots of times, if you can shift your perspective and choose to be grateful, you will find the joy that you're looking for. You don't have to change your life as much as you have to change your perspective.
I wanted to talk with Ann about a moment in her life where she had to come back to terms with this - where she felt that entitlement grow and she had to choose gratitude again.
“I will have been married 25 years this year, and God's been gracious and kind, and Darryl is the far better half. And I realized that I had let entitlement slowly grow in our marriage, where I thought, ‘if you loved me, you would do X,Y, or Zed’. If you confronted me, I don't know if I would have seen it off the top, but over time grew in my heart, and I actually had to start a gratitude journal every day. I wrote down the things that I was grateful for in my husband and grateful for in my marriage. Because there are things that can happen in your marriage and you focus on what the other person's done ‘wrong’. I put that in quotation marks. Because I would keep approaching him to go talk to him and apologize. The enemy could really weevil in there. The enemy, he's the prosecutor, and he would get me all riled up. ‘But he did this. But he did that.’ And I would be back to, ‘yeah, right. I'm not apologizing’.
And what really does good work in my heart is to sit down and write out the things that I'm grateful for in my husband and that puts duct tape over the enemy's mouth where I could focus on all of the good in my husband and start to look for all of the ways he lays down his life for me day in and day out. And I think that kind of discipline of realizing I'm being grateful to the Lord for things, but also, how can I turn around in a relationship that I am struggling with, and sit down and write down the things that you are grateful for in that relationship? And sometimes that might be a relationship with a parent. It might be a relationship with one of your children. It might be your own marriage relationship, a friendship. And the Lord starts to open your eyes to see all of the good in the other person, and tenderly in kindness opens your eyes to ‘where was I entitled in this relationship?’ as opposed to ‘I am so grateful’. And I think realizing if I am deeply grateful for the grace that God has given me, how can I not then extend you the same grace that I've been given?
And that starts to shift my paradigm and shift relationships that I've allowed to be tainted with entitlement back to a place that I am so grateful for who you are and who God has made you to be and who He is growing you to be in Christ. So that has become a practice when I'm really struggling in a relationship is - okay, I'm going to sit down every day and write down things I'm grateful for in this relationship. And that doesn't mean we don't have hard conversations in gratitude. That doesn't mean that we go ahead and slap up a good veneer over things, but it shifts it so that I have a right perspective of the person. I have a right perspective of me in the relationship. And then we can go to hard places and have deep conversations framed though and rooted in a place of, ‘I am so grateful for who you are’.”
I feel like gratitude is kind of this lost art in our day so I asked Ann what she thought is keeping people from living this way. Is it a fear? Is it just a discipline?
“I think sometimes it's a sense of we want to be authentic people, and I think sometimes there's a fear that if I step towards gratefulness and gratitude, I will lose authenticity. That it means I can't go ahead and be honest about how things are hard. I can't go ahead and lament. I can't go ahead and wrestle hard with God. I think there's a sense that if I'm obedient to God and live a life of gratitude, that He’s somehow asking me to slap on a mask that isn't authentic. And I don't think that's a right perspective with gratitude.
I think God's asking us to be grateful for what He is giving us. And at the same time, God is so big. He can take our wrestling. He can take our pounding on his chest with our doubts. He can take our lament. And lament is different than complaining. Complaining says this is wrong. And I don't know if God is good. A lament gets to say, this hurts, and I don't know if this is good, but I know and I trust that God is still good. If we are living a life of gratitude we say, ‘I am grateful for this, Lord. I'm grateful for you as the giver, and I trust your sovereignty and that you're working all things out for good. And I can bring this pain to you.’ We see that all through the Psalms. David says brutally hard things to God, almost audaciously honest with the Lord. And God takes all of that because David is rooted and grounded in who the character of God truly is. Gratitude doesn't mean that I am not honest about my feelings. I think somehow there's a sense that being a cynic and being jaded is sort of hip as opposed to, I can be honest about how difficult things are and that does not negate the goodness of God or that I can be grateful for these things. And sometimes even being grateful for the very hard thing because in the hands of God, God takes the hard things, and He makes them into good things. He takes the good things, and He makes them into forever things that can never be taken away from us. And all of the best things are still ahead of us.
So I don't think we have to be afraid of naming something hard. And at the same time saying this hard thing, God is going to make this into a gift. That's a good thing in my life. Can we sit in the middle of hard places and say that faith gives thanks in the middle of the story? I don't know how the story ends yet, but I know that God is going to use it for good. So I will give thanks in the middle knowing that God holds the ending. I don't think choosing a lifestyle of gratitude in any way says that we can't be honest, authentic, genuine people.”
Next, I wanted to hear from Ann on the tension of living in gratitude while still longing for more of God on earth.
“I think sometimes we get concerned that gratitude comes from a place of privilege. That if I give thanks, that must mean that your life is easy and comfortable. And I think the true transformative, courageous change comes when I give thanks in hard places, and I choose to be so grateful for what God's given me, that I'll walk into hard places and I will sit in broken places and share what I've been given. God's given enough to the world if we will go ahead and share what he's given. So I think, can we go ahead and see that the gratefulness doesn't come from a place that allows you to stay in the place that you are? I think grace always starts movements, And if you’ve truly been moved by grace and moved to gratefulness, it'll move you out into the world to share that grace with others.”
So this week is Thanksgiving, and I want to get really practical and talk about what people could do around their tables with their families to build a practice of Thanksgiving.
“I think sometimes we so look forward to these holidays when we get together, and at the same time, there's part of us that sort of braces and feels great trepidation about moving into those family spaces that can be kind of tender and raw. So maybe it looks like on the front end, opening up a journal and saying, ‘okay, this might be a person that I might find difficult in this coming week. Can I write down some things that I am grateful for for this particular person?’ So it sort of tenderizes our heart on the front end that I think might help us have a different perspective as we move towards gathering around tables. Can you go ahead as you moved towards Thanksgiving and start to look for little things that you're grateful for every day, really small things that you're grateful for and write those things down.
And then can you look for things that you're grateful for in someone who you would see as the ‘other’? That might be someone who holds different political views than you, that might be someone who culturally is very different than you, whose faith might look very different than you. Because I think Christ calls us around tables to bring about unity. He says that they will know us by our love and our compassion and our unity with one another. So I think once we start to really open our eyes and look for what we're grateful for in someone who is the ‘other’, we'll see that there is actually a lot more similar about us than there is different.
And then what would it look like this week to go ahead and actually action-ize that gratitude and put feet on it and take something that you've been given and move it out into the world to someone who is in need? So that might look like serving somewhere, that might look like the food bank somewhere, that might look like some kind of organization that you would really like to support this week. Because I think gratitude has to move out into the world, and that does deep good in us. And actually, what they say is one of the most powerful things we can do is write a letter of gratefulness to someone. That might be someone who shared the faith with you, that might be a Sunday school teacher, that might be someone in elementary school, it might be an old neighbor, it might even be somebody who's caused deep pain in your life. Can you write a letter of gratitude to the Lord about how God used even that for good in your life? It has to be more than cerebral. How do we now actually live intentionally a lifestyle of gratitude that does move us out of our comfort zone but moves us more into God's kingdom?”
I would really challenge you to pick up a pen and a paper right now, and do one of the things that Ann shared because there is not necessarily transformation in more knowledge and just hearing truth, but there is always transformation when you take a risk and you act out of faith and obedience. I have seen that again and again in my life, and I'm telling you, what Ann shared- that's risky. Each one of them is risky. But I would encourage you to do just one thing that could shift a relationship and, at the very least, shift your heart.
