Ten thousand hours is a good benchmark—that’s one hour a day, five days a week, for forty years (with two weeks of vacation each year!). If every Christian decided to spend 10,000 hours developing their capacity in a single cultural domain (painting, stress fracture analysis, genomic sequencing, you name it) and also 10,000 hours on the spiritual disciplines that embody dependence on God (solitude, silence, fasting, study, prayer), in forty years we’d have a completely different world. How are you spending your 10,000 hours?”

How Faithfulness Makes a Genius

Dormant geniuses lie sleeping down the hall.

They eat across from us at the breakfast table, sit next to us in mini-vans taxiing to soccer fields, even look back at us from our bathroom mirrors. What if we realized that genius is simply an act of long faithfulness?  What if  genius is the normative intent of what God’ bestows and our own lack of faithful stewardship results in stunted, malnourished gifts?

László and Klara Polgár, parents of three daughters, understood exactly that. Homeschoolers in Hungary who were harrassed by armed police to enroll their daughters in public school, Klara and László believed that any child could be nurtured to flourish, and exceedingly. It was simply a matter of faithfulness. The Polgar’s were. Faithful hours of considered study and practice were invested.  By 2000, these home educated daughters were at least tri-lingual (one daughter could  speak seven languages), each had achieved top-10 ranking in the world of female chess players, and their youngest daughter, Judit, shattered the previous record for the youngest person, male or female, to earn the title of chess Grandmaster. She was 15 years old. While Susan would later be the number one female chess player in the world, Judit would be the first woman to be rank in the top ten chess players worldwide.  How did the Polgar’s raise three geniuses?

It wasn’t a function of I.Q. or genetics. (László concedes he was a mediocre chess player at best, being regularly beaten by his four-year-old daughter; Klara didn’t even know the rules when their daughters began playing).  It was simply the same way Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Tiger Woods found their way.

By  faithful stewardship. By diligent, attentively focused use of the gifts God hands out liberally to more than a select few.  It’s dangerously tempting to think that geniuses are exceptional products of blazing, divine intervention. Because then we don’t have to closely examine how we are stewarding the gifts He’s given us. Are geniuses really only better stewards? Recent research suggests that very possibility.

Geniuses are stewards who:

Faithfully Practice

Geniuses make it look effortless only because they’ve faithfully practiced. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, posits that  ”extended deliberate practice” is the ultimate key to successful use of a gift. “Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert-level mastery in most fields,” he says. Ericsson’s interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists discovered that by age 20, the best musicians had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, twice the average 5,000 hours  the less accomplished group practiced.

Genius is a long faithfulness.

So fingers stretch across ivories here, shoulders hunch over Latin, brows knit in mathematical quandary. Just two hours a day of concentrated practice over a decade stacks up to 7,000 hours of faithful stewarding. Why not tenderly unfurl a gift?

Geniuses are stewards who

Faithfully Pioneer

The flesh tugs towards the path of least resistance: to keep practicing what we already know. But geniuses steward the gift by faithfully pioneering into unknown territory. Committed stewards continually forge ahead by asking: what weaknesses need strengthening? what skills need extending? Faithful stewards fight the flesh and mind’s dastardly inclination to sloppily automate our gifts by deliberate, ongoing practice and a careful analyzing of the parts of the whole, which forces the brain’s internalization of an improved pattern of execution. Like Benjamin Franklin who would rewrite his favorite articles from memory, then closely compare it with the actual,  we too stretch minds and skills with challenge of new ground.  How can this gift be gently stretched?

Geniuses are stewards who

Faithfully Pursue

Geniuses steward the gift by pursuing a mentor, a faithful nurturer. A coach, a tutor, a teacher are necessary to flourish a gift, to grow it into pioneer territory. Pursuing a supportive environment is paramount for the fostering of a gift and family can offer critical encouragement. When Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, praised children for “how” they did a task—for undergoing the process successfully — most children wanted to take on a increasingly challenging tasks. Generally, such encouraged children’s performances improved, and when it didn’t, they still enjoyed the experience.

The stewarding

It appears that God’s far more generous in placing great gifts into our hands than we’ve ever realized. And it’s our hands that need be faithful stewards of the talents.

I reach out and squeeze the young hand next to me.

That in every human being lies the latent potential of child lies latent genius. ecause if God’s in the business of generously handing out the gift of genius, then that leaves us how do we account for   gives gifts to all,  sparingly hands out gifts, then any lack in aptitude is is  of  and genius is an act of stewarding the gifts. It’s  easier to think that geniuses are the products of divineGenius is an act of long faithfulness.

Talent is overrated highlights a growing body of research which shows that the top achievers in many fields are neither high-IQ geniuses nor former child prodigies turned professionals. In fact, many of these top performers are just reasonably bright people who showed a slight knack for something and then spent decades engaged in “deliberate practice,” which involves spending hours figuring out your weak spots, honing specific skills through constant feedback, and learning as much as possible about your field. The bad news is that such practice is “highly demanding mentally” and “isn’t much fun.”

It is a provocative thesis, which Colvin first put forth in a 2006 Fortune article that ignited a furious debate in the blogosphere. Like Malcolm Gladwell, who has also written a new book on top talent (Outliers), Colvin is deft at finding studies and anecdotes to back up his assertions. For example, he highlights one study which found that top violinists put in more than twice as many hours of solo practice as their lesser peers. And he describes how comedian Chris Rock hones his act at small clubs, so that by the time he plays larger venues he knows exactly how the audience will react to each joke.

You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

Bear in mind that even Winston Churchill, one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, practiced his oratory style in front of a mirror.

Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems.

©2009, Ann Voskamp

Light falls in the orchard, dappled among the gnarled limbs, and the apple blossoms fall too, a perfumed carpet for children’s bare toes. They’ve come, the children. Come to play under spring’s cloud of petals. They’ve come with teacups slid into great-grandma’s tapestry purse, a teddy bear stitched up for a long-ago birth, a blanket that once wrapped a newborn.

I string out laundry, wooden pegs between fingers.

The wind carries their voices with the blossom snow.

“You be Thelma and this is your tea set. The plastic one, remember?” Malakai’s smoothing out the pink gingham blanket with the eyelet trim, while Shalom, a swirl of tulle, carefully takes cups and saucers from her tapestry purse.  (It’s true, every woman, by matter of course, should carry a teacup in purse.)

“And I’ll be Frances.” Malakai’s  propping a bear before the teapot.  He’s come to afternoon tea in too-big cowboy boots, a sheepskin vest.  Tea can be a very manly affair. “And I want your tea set with the red flowers on it because you tell me that the china one with the blue flowers is very hard to find.”

I feel a quiet smile spreading.  They’re playing out one of our read-alouds from this morning, Hoban’s classic, A Bargain for Frances. The story on a page of two friendly badgers having tea is being replayed in our orchard by a teddy-bear toting cowboy and a teapot-in-my-purse princess.  Flat page story stands up into full-bodied life.

It strikes me that the eyelet-and-leather play in the orchard is cosmic, profound theology.  I am watching what our pastor says is the whole of Christianity, it’s ultimate essence, lived out. “You be… and I’ll be….”

As Shalom acts out the part of Thelma … and Malakai plays Frances…. So we daily re-enact the upending message of Christ.  It’s the story we’re fixated on, the one scene that so electrified our lives that we can’t help re-enacting it over and over again, in a thousand ways: You be a sinner like me… and I’ll be Jesus. When you act like I’ve acted — selfish and ugly, proud and stubborn — I’ll be like Jesus: sacrificial and loving,  righteous and faithful.

Child’s play is the Christian’s script.

(Is that why He said that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”? [Mt. 18:3]).

We live out the kingdom of heaven when we represent the person of Christ in all of our encounters. Individually, collectively, we take his part, become His Body,  in this time and space.   Child, I’ll be Jesus to you today… and when you be me, with my tongue and my attitude, I’ll  say His words and I’ll forgive  you like He did me and  I’ll get  down to wash your dirty places …

Playing hard roles is the Christian’s script.

As I watch Shalom and Malakai re-enact a picture book story I see how it’s true: “children who re-enact stories are better at connecting and integrating events… than children only in a story reading group” (Saltz and Johnson, 1974). Isn’t it the same with the children of God? When we as Christians stand Scripture up and walk it off the page, we move from simply reading the story — knowing theology, knowing about Christ — to connecting The God-Man to our lives, integrating our daily events into a Jesus-perspective. Then we are  doing theology, being Christ.

Could spiritual formation really be as simple as the play formation of children? As simple as “You be… and I’ll be.”

Does the role-playing go something like this: “For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you” (Jn. 13:15).

Shalom fills cups  with dandelion wine.  Malakai leans over for another spot of tea, “Now you say…”

Now you say. You say Jesus’ lines. Live the lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins poem:

“Christ plays in 10,000 places
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”

The play unfolds in the orchard under limbs of blossom clouds. Could Christ come play in this place?

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.

©2009, Ann Voskamp

It’s the slow, heaving pant on the other end of the line that wakes me. No words in the receiver, just this heavy, exaggerated exhale of a body.

My brow crinkles. I don’t open eyes, searching for a way out of dreams, to figure out who, why.

And then a voice, hardly audible:

“I think it is today.”

Today?

It registers. My sister’s voice. And today. The Saturday before Mother’s Day.

I know this place. I been here before. Thirteen years ago on the eve of Mother’s Day, it was my labored breathing, the muscles of my abdomen contracting taut and iron hard.

“In Him, you can do this, sister.” I press the phone closer, wanting her to hear, get this.

“Just stay fluid, lean back into it. Let it come. Channels only.”

They are close, handy, those phrases that coached through our six births. And too, I guess what is true of the labor of birth is true of the work of life. Stay fluid, lean back into it. Channels only.

“You think I can do this?” Her teeth are chattering now, nerves jangled, scared.

“Lay back into Him.  Then yes, you can definitely do this.”

She answers with long, methodical breathing.

“Enjoy this.” I whisper. “You know not if you pass this way again.”

We both know it’s time and she has to go and I step into new day coming.

My daughter and I, we dress for a Mother-d aughtergarden tea at the church, day before Mother’s Day. She wears flashing pink and I wear safe black and I don’t know what my own Mama would have wore, for now she cannot come.  My mother will collect my sister’s little girls while my sister lets go of curled child within.
At garden tea, daughter and I, we listen to the chatting, laughing, talk of recipes, sipping of cups, but I am not there. My thoughts are with my sister, with my memories of my laboring too thirteen years ago on the cusp of Mother’s Day.

I am with a uterus emptying.

Sometimes I catch myself, this laying a hand on my flatness, over that still cavity. Sometimes I can feel the pulse of ache’s howl. A woman’s body is hollowed out to create. Her soul made to knit in the private spaces. And so the longings come, these yearnings to fill, to carry, to deliver.

And yet does the womb need an embryonic soul?  Can any kind of soul fill the void?

We are hardly through home’s door from the tea when the phone rings, sister’s voice again.

“Already?” I glance up at the clock over the table.

“She’s here.” Her voice is light, wearily happy. “Now we have four.” I shake my head at the wonder of all those little girls growing old together.

“Ana… after you.” My breath catches. Words scatter, leaving me stilled.

And I realize: We never cease to be with child. Those of us who have birthed, and those of us who never have.
We may not be with child. But we can be with the abandoned, the elderly, the needy. We need not ever let our wombs languish empty. We may always open and welcome another person to find nourishment and comfort within the empty places we have made just for them.

Regardless of age or fertility, we can make spaces within for the growing of souls.  For the unfurling of people’s dreams, their stories, their hurts, their lives.

Do we not line our lives with the stretch marks of love?

Somewhere under a night pinned up with stars, Ana Jordan sleeps near her mother’s face, her warm breath falling, her fists clenched tight.

And we of empty uteruses still swell, making ourselves homes.

My last act on a Saturday before Mother’s Day is the opening of a card to write a haiku of feelings for my own mother who still harbors a place within for me:

Silver-crowned mama
Still you swell, full with child, an
Always dwelling place.

©2009, Ann Voskamp

Sky’s flushing red from today’s long race and children lie in beds and I sit on worn chair in the hallway.  It’s my nightly post, seat at day’s finish line.

From chair there under light, I open pages and read into doorways, into those bedrooms with children tucked under quilts, children waiting (or not) for sleep to slip under covers too.

I’ve found our bookmark in Little House in the Prairie, opened to where we’d left off last night.

“No! Don’t read us a story!” Child voice calls from a pillow. “Plllleease don’t read us a story. Tell us a story! Tell us a story about you.”

And it strikes me: children need us to do more than read story. They want us to tell story–our personal ones.

The Bible is our Grand Story, drama stacked on drama. And after each meal, the eating of physical bread, our family reads from Scripture, feasts on spiritual bread. I’ve passed bowls and now young hands pass out our “gathering Words,” a set of 8 Bibles of the same version, and our voices read verses in unison, slowly savoring. Storytelling around the table.  The words of the God stories linger in our mouths, and we say them aloud to each other, just as Scripture was first lived for the early church: stories spoken aloud in the gathering.

Together, we read The Story.

But what of the other story children need to nourish souls, minds? Won’t we have to tell our own stories, how our lives, today, and God intersect?

This living in story, God’s story and ours, is Epic Parenting, and it’s the way of Jesus: “The followers came to Jesus and asked, “Why do you use stories to teach the people?” (Matt. 13:10)

Jesus didn’t lead by lecturing. He didn’t sermonize, pontificate, moralize or summarize.  He knew well what as a parent I too often forget: Lecturing grinds away at faith.

Simply, Jesus told stories and let the stories alone speak. Because a story’s beauty and potency is twofold, doubly powerful.

1. First, a story gives children a practical prototype. In seeing, hearing, visualizing how Biblical truth reacts when it hits the air of this earth, our fallen flesh, story offers a life simulator like no other. Children see God’s principles test driven. The ethereal becomes concrete; not only does story breathe three-dimensional life into doctrine, but the story prototype now offers a way for children to imitate.
2. Secondly, the story-prototype powerfully prompts.  Any fact or principle that enters into our brains wrapped in emotion is more likely to be remembered.  Thus, while the emotions of a story deeply move, they actually offer the greatest hope of remembering truth and being changed by it. The prompt offered by the story’s prototype ultimately inspires children to live in new ways.

Epic Parenting, parenting out of story, both in the pages of Scripture and the warp of our lives, is potent stuff for our children not only because it’s a faith prototype and a prompt to live the faith, but it is peripateo, the way faith’s robes are passed from generation to the next. Deuteronomy 6: 6-7 urges, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and walk along the road.”

Practical and participatory, telling God’s story, both in Scripture and in our lives, is peripateo, the Greek word for walking–teaching through story as a natural outflow of our talking and sitting and walking with our children.

Epic parenting is storytelling around our togetherness –  about what God wrote during this morning’s errands,  during our vacation last year, from our own childhoods. No curriculum, classes or other paraphernalia necessary. Just a willingness to listen to our lives and tell the whole of God’s epic–the parchment story and personal stories.

God says our lives, tarnished and tainted as the characters that traipse through Scripture, are nothing short of living epistles (2 Cor. 3:3); our lives, lines He  reads as His very own poetry. (Poiema in the Greek  of Eph. 2:10).

Is it any wonder then that our children want us to tell the stories God writes on our days?

In fading light, I lay the storybook of Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie down on my lap. And children prop up on pillows, ready for a true, real-time epic, and slowly words come …. Because we love to tell the story.

©2009, Ann Voskamp

They’ve captured me on film wearing it, like a toga slung over one shoulder, like a mantle flung over and hanging, and sometimes I wave hands, waving off that clicking shutter because I’m wearing this thing, and sometimes, frankly, I entirely forget that it’s there, it flowing from me.

And yet there are ways, after all these years, it’s only now becoming who I am and what it means to love.

They’re meant to hang on racks, these dishtowels, or drape over oven handles, or slip on the knob of cupboard under the sink. I wear mine. The one with the waffle weave, burnt orange and tattered, preferably. But I’m not particular.

The blue striped one, like old pillow ticking, blackened at edges, singed by a close call with a ringing element all aflame, or the faded-from-years gingham from Holland and love of Dutch mother-in-law, whichever, I’ll fling whatever over shoulder, official badge of the domestic, and begin.

Because a mother soaks it up.

Of course, that’s how I came to wear it, them spilling water, tipping juice, splattering milk. I always needed a towel. And couldn’t it pinch hit too as a trivet, napkin, potholder, white flag of surrender?

I’d mop it up, wipe it down, pass it over, just feebly wave. Nearly a decade and a half and half a dozen kids and it’s the exception to our crazy normal to get through a meal without the dumping of the something. And instinctively they reach for me, for it hanging there. It happily works.

But we spill worse.

One morning, I’m buttering toast and they spill soul entrails, again, and I’m left flailing, again. One child mocks and another wails so older child metes out vigilante justice and alliances are formed and betrayed and tensions rocket and any instructive words on my part seem to tip them all more and consequences imparted slop more mess and soon the room tilts and a tsunami wall of rising, ugly pain threatens to deluge our humble abode and sweep all away. Now would seem a good time to throw up arms, wave a feeble dishtowel defeat. What else can a mother do when it all falls apart?

Soak it up. God shoots back an answer to my rhetorical question and I’m rung.

Absorb pain with love. Mop up hurt with embrace. Throw down self and wipe it all up.

It’s what God Himself did with our oil slick of sin, soaking up our crude with His seamless garment, staining His cloth with life laid down. Because, truthfully, there are no other useful options. The only tool you have to contain a toxic sin spill is the only one God had: an absorbent heart.

So I do it. I grab the angriest, messiest heart and hold it close. A wonder! Every single time you can feel it right through you, that potency of touch. It’s how Jesus healed the leper, the blind men, the deaf and dumb man, the mother-in-law of Peter. He absorbed the sin with a lingering, intentional touch. And still today, for all our progressive sophistication, we have no absorbent material that can surpass it, in all its simplicity and limitless availability. Nothing sponges up leaking, sin-oozing skin like another skin gathering you up, holding you long. Touch still cleans; the pressed closeness of a hug still heals.

When our day rips open, hemorrhages, we have the same option, and the only helpful one, as God had. We can wrap our arms around the bleeding one, lay ourselves over the spill and soak it up. It feels good just to hug.

Love alone covers, sops up, a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).

Like the God who “taking a towel, tied it around his waist” (John 13:4 ESV), knelt down to clean up his disciples messiness with tender touch; who wiped them dry with love and “the towel with which He was girded” (John 13:5 NKJ).

Love rags absorb pain in arms open wide, and she becomes it and it becomes her, this towel which girds a mother’s days.

©2009, Ann Voskamp 

It’s 11 a.m. and Toddler’s crying. Her brother kicked her.
I rock Toddler. And recap The Big Three with guilty brother:

• What did you do wrong?
• Why was it wrong?
• What are you  going to do differently in the future? 

And then, as always, The Deal:  Is that a commitment? Can I count on you? He nods, shakes my hand, hugs sniffling toddler.  

Then Daughter screams that Oldest Son stepped in her room, daughter whaps him in shoulder, Oldest Son falls to floor in Oscar winning performance. I ask daughter and son to recite memorized Phil 2:1-4. Third son wanders aimlessly around house looking for his tattered math book. Farmer Husband steps in back door asking if we can have lunch an hour early, Toddler’s paper snippets blizzard across the floor and the farm table’s buried deep under notebooks and phonics tiles.

I want to yell. I do.

Daughter shrinks back. And I can hear my mama’s voice echoing down memories halls: It’s not that you aren’t going to blow it. It’s what you do with it afterwards.
It’s 11 a.m. and it doesn’t look like I’ve done much. Comforted a Toddler, directed a few hearts. Tore a few bricks out of the foundation of my own house. Frustration wields a wrecking ball. 

Some days it’s hard not to wave a white flag in surrender. Clean: And the papers, books, Legos multiply.  Cook: And repeat, repeat, repeat. Wash the clothes; fold the clothes; stack the clothes. And watch them migrate back to the laundry basket.  Direct, disciple, delight.  A mother’s work seems like sand etches; gone with the next wave.

But don’t grains of sand carve stone?

It’s 11 a.m. and I do afterwards what I should have done more fervently before. I kneel in prayer, intentionally creating solitude in the multitude. Kneeling, I remember again Abba Paul, that desert monk who wove baskets.   Abba Paul lived too far from the city to justify traveling to sell his handiwork. Nonetheless, each day he collected palm fronds and worked faithfully. And come the end of the year, when his cave overflowed with long months of toil, he took torch to the work of his hands and the flames cackled long into the night. Come morning, Abba Paul stood in the long quiet and the wind blew away even the ashes. It didn’t look like he’d done much.

It’s 11 a.m. and I’m Abba Paul, with nothing much to show for hard toil. But are the most significant things in our lives things we can tangibly touch? Won’t the majority of our work, the laundry, the housecleaning, the meal-making, while necessary acts of service, just too burn up?
God’s Word warns, “But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward” (1 Cor. 3:13-15). 

That’s the kind of mother work to invest in: work that survives, endures. The kind of work that isn’t washed away with the next wave, isn’t tinder for the next match. But what work survives fire?  Abba Paul’s baskets didn’t. But what he wove with the baskets did: prayer.

So a mother kneels. So a mother gets up and works and prays, prays and works. Because the prayers we weave into the matching of socks, the stirring of oatmeal, the reading of stories, they survive fire. Prayer is our real, enduring work.  And aren’t the prayers of our days more important than the products of our days?   

Jesus said, “My house is a house of prayer.” And that’s the only way I can keep mine standing.

It’s 11 a.m. and I kneel to pray.

©2009, Ann Voskamp 

It’s an unlikely place to spend the final hours of the Christmas holidays.

The planet twinkles in the glow of lit trees circled with family. And this family works in the barn. Sows grunt, piglets root and nuzzle udders for milky warm. Snow falls soundlessly out there in the dark.

I am supposed to be feeding hungry sows, but the sounds mesmerize me:

were these the first earth sounds that reverberated in the Babe’s ear drums? From the lofty arias of the heavenly host to this, this snorting of beasts, this banging of feed troughs? And the smells: from the incense wafting through the celestial heights, to this air hanging thick with dung’s rank, dust’s heavy itch?

Hard to comprehend: God left kairos and entered into chronos through the means of a barn. Not to vaulted domes but to a cob-webbed, manure reeking barn, a barn where most folk would not step foot in without changing clothes, without covering nose from the offensive smells. But our God isn’t antiseptic, carefully avoiding dirt, grime, stink. Of all the places on this spinning orb, He intentionally decided to clothe himself as a naked baby and birth His virgin skin onto a mucking bed for animals.

He chose a barn as His entry point. He chooses our dirty places, our stinking places, the places that shame us, as His point of entry into our lives.

Funny how the lights celebrating the birth of the Christ Child, God with us, still illuminate this earth when we embark on a New Year, a new hope. A new us. Standing here, slopping hogs, it seems so clear:

such New Year hope is only plausible because of Christmas. Without the Babe who came to the barn, who didn’t hesitate to meet us in the rotting mess of our sin, the new year would only be a rehashing of the old year. But when we rip off that last calendar page and begin time with a clean slate, the Barn Babe is still new, stretching, waiting to grow up in us. The Christ Child enters our lives in the places where the flies buzz over refuse and dung and chooses to grow up within us right here.

The swaddled Babe murmurs, “Behold, I make all things new” –Rev. 21:5

I take Farmer Husband’s hand and we walk out of the barn and into the chill of Christmas night and out towards the New Year. Heavens seem warm, close, nailed up there with shimmering stars. Christmas night and the world seems hushed. Even the children walking in from the barn, whisper. Our orchard sleeps under its winter white blanket.

And I know: visions of New Year excellence will prove barren “for human efforts accomplish nothing” (John 6:63). Past year’s failed resolutions prove it: “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

But this New Year birthing has good fruit hope because of Who was just birthed in the barn. Because the Barnyard God Babe will grow up in us, this God-with-us transforming the squalor of our lives into health and wholeness.

My New Year’s may still smell of the barn. Which is exactly why it has Hope.

©2009, Ann Voskamp

I lose it two weeks before Christmas Day in the morning.

The kids string popcorn by the fire, untangle lights for the tree, curl sprays of shimmering ribbons, and I wildly dismantle the house. Losing a ring, a gift that had been sent to me from Iona Abbey, makes me lose it. Centuries of pilgrims had made the journey to the stone monastery in Iona, Scotland, to kneel low and pray long. And my Iona ring, a Celtic knot, was like a silver string around my finger, reminding me to do likewise, always, wherever I wandered.

And it’s lost. I pray.

In the back of bread box? Under dishwasher? Down bathroom register? 19 coins, innumerable pencils nubs, and a whole shovelful of legos are discovered under the couch cushions… but no ring. Not under mattresses, in vacuum cleaner, atop fridge. Nowhere.

Snow falls higher and the day draws closer and my sadness seeps through. Presents pile high with promise of gain on December 25th, but I keep thinking of loss, me the woman who had lost treasured silver circle and swept her house up in a flurry of searching (Lk. 15:8). I’ve lost the reminder to pray but keep the vigil. With the opening of every drawer, I’d hope, “Maybe here, maybe today?”

And then I unbend. I straighten up into it, look out at the gentle shake of flakes, and I see it clearly. 

How much of my Christmas was genuine vigil, looking, seeking, hoping, for Jesus? Did I care this much about finding Him? This advent, how did I faithfully search for Him who comes for us?

That first Noel, ragged shepherds came with gifts of adoration for the God-Babe and found Him wrapped in rags, lying in a barn feed trough. An unexpected, messy place for Divinity descended.

I hadn’t looked there yet. 

With the prayer ring lost and carols playing, I begin the true seeking.

We gather for holidays with extended family and hearts snag. A barbed word here, a snarl there. Is this a messy place to find Jesus? I keep the vigil… and find Christ in a listening hear, a lingering touch, a long grace.

On a starry night on a big stage, a special needs child slurs his lines in the Christmas play and we strain to decipher words and my eyes brim and spill. Is this an unexpected place to find Jesus? I keep the vigil…and find Christ in thunderous applause, the laughing eyes of smiling boy. 

Children squeeze in close with fists full of sprinkles and bellies full of mirth and we deck out stacks of sugar cookies, fill bags with cheer for the prison ministry. Is this a giving place to find Jesus? I keep the vigil… and find Christ in loving the least who give us the most: the joy of giving without gain.

I rock a nauseous child in the lights of the tree on Christmas Eve, listen to tummy rumbling, wash a forehead with cool cloth. Is this a cradling place to find Jesus? I keep the vigil… and find Christ in simple closeness, in tending to the sick, the reason why He came.

Two weeks before Christmas Day in the morning, I lose a ring, but begin a pilgrimage to the holy ground of Christmas. And bowing there, I discover that Christmas can’t be bought. Nor can Christmas be created, with popcorn memories or handmade bows.

Christmas can only be found. 

In the messy, in the unexpected, in the giving, in the cradling. Maybe here, maybe today, Christmas can truly be found.

Found in the promise with greatest gain: the Person of Christ.

Are you searching?

©2008, Ann Voskamp

Later I would learn that Uccello painted the Battle of San Romano with tempera on wood panel in 1435, a scene recounting the victory of the Florentines over the Sienese.

But walking through the Louvre that day I didn’t know any of that. Frankly, the painting’s spirited clash of metal, charging horses, flapping banners appealed little to my pastoral, peace-loving sensibilities. But it was that boy sitting there….

If it hadn’t been for that cross-legged boy sitting on the floor of the gallery, a few feet from this masterpiece that purportedly once hung in Napoleon’s bathroom, I likely wouldn’t have given the work more than a passing glance.

But when I realized what this child attempted in the circling of tourists and foreign languages and the clicking of shutters, I lingered long, intrigued.

What I witnessed brushed me, dyed me, soaked into the fabric of me.

Actually, the young boy didn’t gaze on Uccello’s painting either. I never saw him look directly at it. Instead, this boy of perhaps ten turned slightly to peer at the canvas beside him. An artist had propped up an easel in front of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, carefully dipped her brush into the palette atop a stool, and painstakingly copied every stroke of Uccello’s unto her canvas.

And this boy copied every stroke of hers.

Perhaps it was that Uccello’s work overwhelmed the budding artist in terms of sheer size, overall complexity or looming magnificence.

Or maybe because he simply could see this living artist, this intentional, considered painter right here before him, that he decidedly imitated her every gesture.

In a way, she incarnated Uccello.

She highlighted the sheen of a mane just like Uccello’s and the boy, simple ballpoint pen in hand, slowly sketched the arch of a mount just like that. She daubed at her recreation of Uccello’s shadow falling across armor. The boy too let his pen carefully shade.

She painted Uccello. He painted her.

The child copied the copyist.

The gallery surged with another drove of sight-seers murmuring over the masters, but it’s the unsophisticated drawing of a child imitating an imitator that captivated me. That scene of one disciple following another disciple following the Master is the one imprinted on my memories of the world’s most renowned museum.

For wasn’t it a kind of incarnating of the essence of the art of parenting? More: of spiritual formation? Ultimately: of Christ-likeness.

God first stretched flesh over Himself in the person of Christ and came among us to show us how to make the God-life come to life. He brought the God canvas close so we might see it, live and in color, that we too might imitate. And now His Spirit perpetually stretches skin over Christ-in-us to show our children, the world at large, how to animate the canvas of a soul with the same God-life. We, who imitate Him, bring our God-canvas close, so others too might imitate.

That life-relay in the Louvre re-enacted Paul’s exhortation to children in the faith, “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Our children imitate those they spend time with, are attached to, be it peers, parents, teachers, coaches, faith communities. Jesus concurs, “It is enough for the student to be like his teacher…” (Matthew 10:25).

I wonder what my children are copying from the life modeled in the daily gallery of my heart, this home?

I may well forget that Uccello used wooden models of the rearing steeds in the Battle of San Romano, or applied silver leaf so that the metal studs gleamed, luster long now worn off. But for these children circling through my day, watching what I paint on the canvas of these hours, I do well not to forget:

Draw God. Incarnate Jesus. Imitate His Spirit.

They’re copying our life-canvas.

Photos: watching the imitator be imitated at the Louvre

©2008, Ann Voskamp

“It’ll get better if you get closer.”

John’s mom laughs as she untangles five-year-old John and Malakai, two boys practicing for a three-legged-race at a community gathering.

But our Malakai’s close to tears as I unknot him from a snarl of arms and legs and feet.

“Really, if you’ll get closer, put your arms around each other, you’ll find it gets easier.” John’s mom takes an arm and wraps it around a shoulder and I find one too and direct it around a neck, and the boys shyly giggle and step out again.

“One-two! One-two! One-two!” John’s mom chants, and I cheer, and the boys stride off in rhythm, arms flung over shoulders. And the boys turn faces to each other, happy eyes shining, and belly-laugh. Us mamas can’t help but laugh too. They’re maneuvering life’s tangle!

For isn’t family life a bit of a three-legged race? Days tie us together, and schedules trip us up, and everything snarls. We stumble and fall and it hurts. Tears brim.

“It’ll get better if we get closer.” Because relationship— love—is the most transformative force in the universe. It’s what God wants with us: intimate relationship. Get closer. And it will get better.

Too often, I buy the lie, the one the serpent hisses. Speak harsher and it will get better. (More tasks will get accomplished.) Push harder and it will get better. (More places can get crammed into the hours.) Bluster longer and it will get better. (More life squeezed into life.)

But don’t I know it? “A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city…” (Proverbs 18:19). The harshness, the blustering, the pushing, offends and we trip. Knees and elbows smash and we  bruise. It gets harder to get up.

A flurry of accomplishments will not get us happily across life’s finish line. Tasks aren’t the purpose nor the priority. If to-do lists are what compels us, inevitably, we’ll stumble. Because that’s not the essence of family life.

The essence of family life is the care of souls.

When we tenderly draw near, collect hearts, wrap each other in arms and love, we hit our stride.  The three-legged race (or five legged or seven legged or ten legged race) becomes a happy delight. We get closer. And it gets better.

What I’m learning as we step (sometimes fumble) through the three-legged race of family life, these ways of getting closer genuinely make it better:

• Reach out and gently touch when you talk; make it a practice to always connect before your direct.
• Fully listen to conversations with your ears, eyes, whole body language. Smile into eyes.
• Make time for walks, a mug of hot chocolate, a chapter of a book read aloud together. There’s no better way to spend time than making time.
• Let your words fill with the affection you feel. Children don’t assume they’re loved when our words aren’t loving.
• Tuck in with long talks in the dark, a foot rub, prayers. It’s the happiest way to finish a day.
• Slow down: the priority is hearts not household tasks. Take a deep breath and preach to yourself often: “I want to be more than I want to do.” Relationship is not just the priority. It’s all there is. Our family relationship are hallowed. Aren’t they forever? (Clean floors and schedules aren’t.)

The three-legged boys practice intently and when the race begins, I’m at the other end, arms wide open, ready for Malakai and John as they step, tumble, laugh across the finish line. And when they fall into me and I wrap them up, this happiness feels good.

We’re closer and it couldn’t be better.

©2008, Ann Voskamp