On her family's recent trip to Haiti, Ann Voskamp noticed that you don't see girls in the streets. She writes about it at her A Holy Experience blog.
Here where garbage is thrown into the light, but girls are used up in the dark until they shatter in the shadows like glass, here where we pick all these shards in the streets that cut with its invisible trafficked girls.Our daughters have water. And light and hope and choices and our girls sleep on mattresses with clean sheets and clean dreams, no one buying up pieces of them to deface, to crush with the hot weight of their gratification, and we have a pantry and spaghetti and meatballs and homemade bread on our plates and Anne of Green Gables on our shelves and we don’t step over sewage in the streets or drink our carried water out of filthy pails.
A recent statement from Gloria Steinham: “Fire in the belly doesn’t come from gratitude. It comes from getting mad about what happens to you.”
Ann Voskamp sees it differently:
When you are radically grateful for what you have, you will go to radical lengths to share it.When you are radically grateful, you live out of a place of radical abundance — there’s always more space for more to share the grace.
When you’re overwhelmed with the goodness of God to you — you overflow with the goodness of God to others.
You haven’t discovered fire until you’ve discovered grace. When grace touches you, it combusts you and you become one unstoppable flame.
Real gratitude doesn’t make you apathetic — it makes you a real activist. Real gratitude isn’t an anesthetic — real gratitude makes you catalytic.
A little girl suddenly appears.
And she grabs my hand and the Farmer’s daughter reaches for the little girl’s other hand and there’s a grace that unchains us and links us and our shadows light like fire in my bones.
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