Excerpt from Selections from One Thousand Gifts: Finding Joy in What Really Matters by Ann Voskamp.

I speak to God: I don't really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done — yesterday.

In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its "live in the moment" buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync? To have the time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green and time to wonder at all of them in all the light, this time refracting in prism. I just want to do my one life well.

How to Slow Down

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: What I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. And when I'm always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time's river slows, slows, slows.

Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention. In this space of time and sphere, I am attentive, aware, accepting the whole of the moment, weighing it down with me all here.

I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.

This is where God is. In the present. I am — His very name. I want to take shoes off. I am, so full of the weight of the present, that time's river slows to a still … and God himself is timeless. This is supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in moment… This I need to consecrate: time.

"My always present God, my rock to hide under." -Ann Voskamp

When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and … holy.

I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt.

I hunger to taste life.

To taste God.

-Ann Voskamp

Learn More

Learn more about Selections from One Thousand Gifts, coming March 2012.

Visit Ann Voskamp's blog at www.aholyexperience.com.

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