A woman who writes daily about Emmanuel, God living among us

Ann Voskamp, shown here

with her husband, the farmer, writes one new post every day at A Holy Experience. Her posts always succeed in bringing out my emotions. Despite dealing with life's losses, Ann always turns to the Author of Life for answers. She writes about a girl waiting in the hospital for a new heart. "We bow our heads and pray and how do you pray for what has to happen to find a still-warm and pulsing heart — and how can we not?"

And she writes of her brother-in-law: "And then there’s the kids’ uncle, our kin, laying in a hospital bed while we sing with a children’s choir, and while we wait for the next hymn, he’s waiting to roll into the surgical theatre and under those white lights, waiting for them to cut way to his heart and find whatever’s blocking the flow of his only wooshing life. His kids are younger than ours."

She writes about a baby born this week to her friends. "The baby’s born with his pulmonary artery and aorta are the wrong way around. They cup the vernix-creased boy to their chests and they name him Leo. Leo, like Leo, the Lionhearted. Leo’s heart roars slow but fierce, 60 times every minute. Before he’s 72 hours old, they’ll open up his new pink skin and lay it into him, a double chambered pacemaker, and pray grace descends and he thrums at 130."

She asks, "How do you open up your heart after rejection’s slammed you closed, after you’ve exposed dreams and begged prayers, after you’ve tasted the the rot of loss, after the loss keeps coming and gets caught right there in your gullet? How do you walk through this hard world with your heart gaping tender open?

She concludes,

"And the good things in life are not health but holiness,

not the riches of this world but relationship with God,

not our plans but His presence —

and He withholds no good thing from us

because life’s good things aren’t ever things.

Can all the hurting hearts believe that He withholds no good thing from us? (Ps. 84:11) Don’t you have to believe that first — before you open up your tender heart?