I am grateful of a writer/mentor found...Ann Voskamp!
[EXCERPT]
"What in the world, in a world of certain loss, is grace? And the more of the blessings I name, this theological problem deepens, the kind that manifests itself between the breakfast table and last light out. If I am numbering gift moments to one thousand and now beyond - what moments in my life count as blessings? If I name this moment as gift, grace, what is the next moment? Curse? How do you know how to sift through a day, a life, and rightly read the graces, rightly ascertain the curses?
What is good? What counts as grace? What is the heart of God?
Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on hemorrhaging humanity? A God who breaks through the carapace of this orb only now and then, surprises us with a spared hand, a reprieve from sickness, a good job and a nice house in the burbs - and then finds Himself again too impotent to deal with all I see as suffering and evil? A God of sporadic, random, splattering goodness - that now and then splatters across a gratitude journal? Somebody tell me: What are all the other moments?
Levi moans. I brush his cheek soft. Is there Tylenol in the kitchen? My Bible lies open by the gratitude journal. I look for a bottle of pills to ease the pain, and I remember the summer I was twelve.
We beat it down a gravel road in a cloud of dust, and I looked over at the billboard that the van Veens had planted back in their woods. I asked Dad why anyone would bother putting a sign up in their woods if no one could make out the words. He looked at me squinting, and my mama made me an optometrist's appointment. Next time we drove by van Veens' words in the woods, I wore glasses, horn-rimmed frames. And I saw the words as clear as a bell and I read them plain: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16:31KJV).
The woods spell out words. I need a lens to read them.
Every dark woods has words. And every moment is a message from The Word-God who can't stop writing His heart.
But who can read His messages?"
I am hooked...eating up the pages of this book.
Eucharisteo!
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