Learning to live and speak in a new country is both exhilarating and terrifying. Sometimes scary, but mostly exciting. Which is why Anne Voskamp’s blog post was especially meaningful to me last week.

Here are some gems:

Sometimes we shroud who we are becoming, to keep all the tender, stretching places, safe. Sometimes we fear the words that might abort dreams, the future that might miscarry, the humility that might hurt.

“I know not….know not of so much. Of everything. But I am venturing out into the questions in search of the answers.”

Little did I know how the venturing out would terrify and that it would never stop terrifying and that fear never stops the faithful, full of Him, from leaping anyway.

(my italics)

Ann frequently addresses fear in her posts, looks at it squarely, and leaps. I think it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Love casts out fear, John said.

I can’t wait for Ann’s new book coming out in Jan. ’11.
One broken woman,
One wild quest for joy,
One Thousand of His Gifts
Sounds like my kind of book! I will find a way to get it from the USA to Poland without paying exorbitant shipping. It will be a must-have.

I am proud that I know a small part of what is in the book. Ann gave me permission to share three blog posts with the writing class at CBS last winter. She said the posts would soon not be available on the blog, because of being integrated into the book and becoming Zondervan’s property. The students were moved with her writing. We called it “emotive.”

What has happened to Ann is every blogger’s dream: a publisher found her blog and asked her for a book. She is most deserving, and I’m so glad she didn’t let fear stop her first tentative fingers on the keys of cyberspace. Ann has guided thousands to give thanks, find joy in the mundane,
see the sacred in the chaos,
the Cross in the clothespin,
the flame in the bush.