Daily Verse
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Gratitude and Thanksgiving
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Wednesday's Reflection
Psalm 34:1 — I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
Ann Voskamp grew up on a farm in Ontario, Canada. When she was five years old, her three-year-old sister Aimee ran into the farm lane chasing a cat and was struck and killed by a delivery truck. Ann watched it happen. Her mother held the dying child while the blood soaked through the quilt wrapped around her. The driver sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and wept, saying he had never seen her. That event cracked the foundation of Ann's childhood. Her father stopped going to church. Her mother spent years in and out of hospitals. Ann carried the weight of it into adulthood, into marriage, into a life of farming and raising seven children of her own — living with a quiet, persistent grief and an inability to find genuine joy.
Then a friend issued a simple challenge: write down one thousand gifts. Things you can see around you right now that God has given. Just start writing. Ann began reluctantly. Morning shadows on old floors. Jam piled high on toast. The sound of her children's laughter. The way light came through the kitchen window. Small things. Ordinary things. But as the list grew, something changed. She discovered that the practice of naming gifts — what she called eucharisteo, the Greek word for thanksgiving at the root of the word for grace — was slowly rebuilding what grief had broken. Not by denying the loss or pretending the pain was gone. But by choosing, day after day, to bring her eyes back to what remained and what was given, and to say thank you for it.
David's instruction to bless the Lord at all times is not a command to feel happy all the time. It is a command to practice gratitude as a discipline — continually, not just when circumstances make it easy. Ann Voskamp's story shows what that practice can do when held to over years. It does not erase grief. But it can slowly fill in around it, until the soul finds it has more to stand on than it thought.
Prayer: Father, help us to count what You have given. In the ordinary, overlooked moments of today — the meal, the breath, the light — teach us to see Your hand and give thanks. Amen.