“How I want to see the weight of glory break my thick scales, the weight of glory smash the chains of desperate materialism, split the numbing shell of deadening entertainment, bust up the ice of catatonic hearts. I want to see God, who pulls on the coat of my skin and doesn’t leave me alone in this withering body of mortality; I want to see God, who gives gifts in hospitals and gravesides and homeless shelters and refugee camps and in rain falling on sunflowers and stars falling over hayfields and silver scales glinting upriver and sewage flowing downriver….
One one stem of wheat bows its head before me. Behind it, the perfect backdrop of pure moon full, pregnant with the grandeur. I reach out my hand, run my finger up its silk slender shank. This is how. I learn to say thank you from a laid low head of wheat From the wind rustling glory through the dried blades of grass raised, from the leaves in the silver maple hushed awed still. I pay tribute to God by paying attention. I raise one hand high. And another hand high. I bow the head down. I lay the body down. ‘The life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration. It does not grow anywhere else,’ writes J.I. Packer. I am bowed like wheat, raised like grass blades, grounded and rooted to now, and from Him and through Him and to Him are all things and all is His and everything that has breath praises Him and I whisper it again and again, remembering, remembering, remembering.”
— Ann VosKamp, One Thousand Gifts, p 110-111.