One Thousand Gifts

 All I have seen

teaches me to trust the Creator

for all I have not seen.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last month, I took an impulsive trip to Belleville, Michigan to celebrate my best friend's belated surprise 50th birthday party. It was great fun, flying in, catching a cab, blowing up balloons and shouting "SURPRISE!" within the folds of her enormous crowd of friends. Surprise it was!

After the party, we drove to a store to pick up a few items. As we walked, we fell predictably into thick conversation. I said, "Beth Ann, I feel as though I am being showered with a thousand gifts. I see these gifts and I feel these gifts," ~ blessings like the soft, renewing rain that falls from a sun-drenched cloud ~ "but I am not receiving these gifts. I want to open my hands and open my heart and receive all the gifts that are being showered upon me at this moment in my life."

She smiled a mischievous smile and said, "Oh, now I'm going to surprise you!" And she took my hand and led me through the store to a small aisle of books. "Let's see," she said, "I'm sure it's here." Her eyes scanned the shelf and then with enormous delight she grabbed Ann Voskamp's new book, "One Thousand Gifts." She planted it in my hand. "This is your answer," Beth Ann said with her characteristic sense of conviction.

So I've been curled up with Ann Voskamp this past month. She has a unique writing style - a conversational prose with a turn of phrase that makes you stop and listen again to the way the words lilt across her page. In this book, she examines the word "eucharisto," which was quickly shortened in my hasty mind as "eucharist" and then immediately filed away as "communion".

In that moment my mind closed, thinking, "After a lifetime of communion, I think I know communion." But I recognized my fault and back-tracked to re-read with an intent to listen ~ to hear ~ and to learn.

Eucharisto means thanksgiving and it envelopes the word "charis" which means "grace". It also holds the derivative, "chara" which means "joy". Ann Voskamp's book is an interesting study of the deeper significance and the transformative power of thanksgiving, of grace and joy in the ups and downs of daily life. She recognizes her own mind's inclination to close and she opens her mind and heart to God by accepting her friend's challenge to list 1,000 gifts that are hidden in plain view.

Beth Ann was right. "One Thousand Gifts" teaches me what I was longing to understand. It's not enough to *know* you are being showered with a thousand gifts. Each blessing has meaning and purpose, but like a prettily wrapped present resting in your hands, it is nothing until it is opened and accepted with joy and thanksgiving.

As G.K. Chesterton once said, "our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again." Because there's so much beauty to behold ...