There is this book.
It is phenomenal. Beautiful. Poetry. Soul-stirring. Encouraging and challenging and revolutionary.
It will change the way you live, the way you treat others, the way you see God.
I want to give you a copy. ::
‘I walk in our back door to candlelight still flickering, hang the keys on the hook, and look around at the steep mountain of laundry there in the mudroom, the shoes scattered, a coat dropped.
The mudroom sink is grime ringed. Fingerprints smear across the mirror. And I laugh the happiest wonder.
In an afternoon’s drizzle, I give happy thanks for the daily mess with a smile a mile wide, because this is again my chance to wholeheartedly serve God, to do full-bodied eucharisteo with the hands and the heart and the lips.
I can count each task a gift, pure eucharisteo. Grace!
This work—the thousand endless jobs—they each give the opportunity for one to become the gift, a thousand times over!
Because with every one of the thousand, endless jobs, I become the gift to God and to others, because this work is the public God serving, the daily liturgy of thanks, the completing of the Communion service with my service.
While the Deceiver jockeys to dupe us into thinking otherwise, we who are made in the image of God, being formed into Christ’s likeness, our happiness comes, too, not in the having but in the handing over. Give your life away in exchange for many lives, give away your blessings to multiply blessings, give away so that many might increase, and do it all for the love of God.
I can bless, pour out, be broken and given in our home and the larger world and never fear that there won’t be enough to give. because eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end. And it is God Himself who serves me as I serve.
He calls us to serve, and it is Him whom we serve, but He, very God, kneels down to serve us as we serve.
The servant-hearted never serve alone.
Serve God alone –spend the whole of your one wild and beautiful life investing in many lives — and God simply will not be outdone. God extravagantly pays back everything we give away and exactly in the currency that is not of this world but the one we yearn for: Joy in Him…
And this eucharisteo wakens me wide-eyed and nodding to the words of Tagore that I, a mother of six, now own, bought with the practice of eucharisteo:
“I slept and dreamt life was joy, I awoke and saw life was service, I acted and, behold, service was joy.”
I reach out and touch the reflection in the splattered mirror over the sink and whisper into those eyes: Yes, today, again, yes, you can bless! Here you can enact eucharisteo; here you can become a current in a river of grace that redeems the world!
Here I can become the blessing, a little life that multiplies joy, making the larger world a better place.
God can be in me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
I am blessed.
I can bless.
So this is happiness.‘
-Excerpt from One Thousand Gifts by: Ann Voskamp
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