Scrappy Socks and One Thousand Gifts

 The knitting is a pair of socks knit with leftover yarn and the book is One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp.

I have a lot of odds and ends leftover from sock projects and I started this scrappy pair of socks on Christmas Day.  They're my husband's, and most of the scraps are from socks that I've knit for him and our parents.  I recently re-read One Thousand Gifts and had thought I would enjoy writing a blog post about using small parts of skeins to make something whole that's imperfect but beautiful and pairing it with Voskamp's search for joy and the goodness of God amidst large tragedies and daily irritants.  

But I just kind of petered out and kept getting distracted by how often she writes that she stumbles rather than walks.  They eat a lot of bread and she chokes on it, but sometimes I think it's supposed to be a metaphor?  Some of her writing is incisive and amazing.  At other times, I just get hung up on how often she writes at a remove--using the article "the" instead of personal pronouns.  

The dare (I guess) is to write a list of 1,000 things she's grateful for.  And she does.  She also studies a lot of Greek and wants to seek full communion with God.  She also condemns her anger over evil in the world as blasphemy because to not trust God is to deny his omnipotence and love through choosing bitterness and discontent, which is the way of Satan.  

This book is a lot, by the way.  But I've been in the mood to re-read it, though, and I'm glad I did.  She keeps writing down gifts long after she hits #1,000.  Between daily searching for gratitude, reading the Bible along with the mystics, she realizes that the key to gratitude is to rejoice amidst the bad stuff instead of plucking out the good things as if they're separate and apart from everything else. I apparently liked one passage enough to put a little sticky note on the page.  Right in the middle of trying to deal with a fight with her sons--she had 6 kids when she wrote this book and now she has 7--she writes "I should want to care, and I try to will myself, but I'm hard, so tired. I turn away.  See, somehow I've got to see, got to feel. How did Jesus do it again? He turned His eyes. "And looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave..." (Matthew 14:19 NIV). He looked up to heaven, to see where this moment comes from. Always first the eyes, the focus.  I can't leave crowds for mountaintop, daily blur for Walden Pond --but there's always the possibility of the singular vision.  I remember: Contemplative simplicity isn't a matter of circumstances; it's a matter of focus." And the first thing she does next is thank God for her sons.

Two things:

1. I always love when people say they can't live like Thoreau at Walden Pond because that guy had his mom doing his laundry and bringing him meals.  Plenty of people could think thoughts and write writings if they had a team of people taking care of every other aspect of their lives but that's not a thing for most people! 

2. I really love the Christian woman bloggers from the late oughts and 2010s because they were reading and studying and writing and forming relationships and taking care of family and they were so open and earnest about it.  They knew they couldn't live the way people do when they run off to retreats and their writing and faith were so much richer for it.  It's one thing to read something when someone tells you that you should be grateful for your children at all times.  It's another to read about someone thanking God for their sons right as those sons are about to physically fight each other in the kitchen. 

I don't follow Voskamp's blog, and I don't agree with some of her views, and sometimes I don't even understand what she's talking about.  But I was in the mood for some of her perspective and reading this was calming.  I re-started a list of gifts.  I knit a pair of socks for my daughter from scraps.

 I'm trying to focus on what brings me joy.  I'm trying to bless those around me, or at least not be awful to them.  I scribble in notebooks and eat a lot of bread.  I started a pair of socks for myself.  Maybe I can show you next time.