Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.
Ann VoskampRead
Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.
Interpretation
Motherhood is a unique and sacred role that involves shaping the lives of children.
In this quote, Ann Voskamp emphasizes the sanctity and significance of motherhood, portraying it as a divine calling where parents contribute to the development of their children's character and soul. The concept of co-laboring implies a partnership in nurturing and guiding, highlighting the importance of this relationship and the privilege it brings to those who undertake the role of a mother.
In practice
In a Mother's Day speech, one could reflect on the sacred nature of nurturing children, using this quote.
Being joyful isn't what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.
If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips.
I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.
When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?
They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time... the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life... God gives us time. And who has time for God? Which makes no sense.
I never missed a birthday. I never missed a school play. We carpooled. And the greatest compliment I can ever get is not about my career or performance or anything; it's when people say, 'You know, your girls are great.' That's the real thing for me.
As a parent, if give yourself what you need, your children will watch you doing that and will give themselves what they need.
He touched the screen as if trying to reach through with his hand. "You're a wonderful young lady. I don't tell you that often enough. You remind me so much of your mother. She'd be proud. And Grandpa Tom" --he chuckled-- "he always said you'd be the most powerful voice in our family. You're going to outshine me some day, you know. They're going to remember me as Piper McLean's father, and that's the best legacy I can imagine.
And everything else will then turn out to be unimportant and inessential except this: father, child, and love. And then, looking at the simplest things, we will all say, Could we have not learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded in everything that is?
I know how sobering and exhausting parenthood is. But the reality is that our children's future depends on us as parents. Because we know that the first years truly last forever.
Having a child, particularly your first child, is such a life-changing moment. Nothing can really prepare you for that.
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