How Counting the Good Rewired My Brain

I first read 1,000 Gifts with a group of college friends in my last semester of undergrad. We would read a chapter a week and then meet to talk about it. It was a busy season of life. I was taking 6 credits, completing my student teaching, studying and taking the state tests that would help me get my teaching license, and planning a wedding.

But those evenings with friends were a highlight of my week, and the discussions we had together burrowed deeply into my soul. Although I had always enjoyed looking on the bright side of things and remembering the good God had done in my life, this book challenged me to notice the goodness of God in the hard, unexplainable times as well.

Ann Voskamp didn’t just write about rainbows and butterflies. 1,000 Gifts begins with the story of her young sister getting crushed by a truck and the family trauma that followed. She wrote of finding goodness in the ashes of anxiety, fear, and panic attacks. A friend challenged her to write down 1,000 things she loved.

She says, “It began to profoundly change my life. I realized that joy is a function of gratitude and gratitude is a function of perspective. No matter what the situation was, could I change my perspective and see that there is always, always, always
something to be grateful for?”

Without rewriting it all down for you here, let me just say that this perspective gradually shifted the way I viewed everyday life. I had always believed that “being thankful” was important. But consciously writing down thankfulness in the good and the bad began to show me that choosing gratitude and intentionally looking for the merciful hand of God in everything was vital to my own heart attitude.

Obedience Through Being Thankful

Everyone who’s read through the Pentateuch knows the Israelites struggled with
grumbling. God would do something absolutely incredible to show them He was good, He was with them, and He was taking care of them. Then a little bit of time would pass, and they would grumble again.

I’m prone to the same. I have a chronic case of forgetfulness. In fact, I have around fourteen years of thankful lists, each counting around 1,000. But every so often, I find myself more anxious than normal, struggling to see God’s hand in my life, and
wondering what’s going on.

There are obviously a lot of factors that go into this with being pregnant or postpartum for nine of those years. But I’ve noticed something interesting. So many times when I’ve felt extra anxiety in my heart, I’ve reached for my thankful list and found a large gap in the dates. I was forgetting to notice the goodness of God in my life.

Invitation

Taking the time to notice the goodness of God has been a lifeline in many dark or difficult times in my life. Postpartum panic attacks, my husband’s experience with clinical depression, international moves, multiple knee surgeries. Thankfulness has taken my eyes off what I felt was my reality and changed my view to an eternal perspective.

I encourage you today to start your own list. You don’t have to overthink it. Sometimes mine is about food, pretty nails, or sunlight streaming through the window. Sometimes it looks more like a friend’s words that sharpened me, how God used one of my kids to challenge me, or encouragement from a passage in the Bible.

But the more I’ve chosen to see the good and write it down, the more I’ve seen that constant gratitude is actually a weapon to fight back worry, fear, and anxieties in my life. It kicks out the voice of my adversary and crystallizes what’s truly important in life.

I used to write my thankful list on scraps of paper. Then I graduated to adding it to the front of my devotional journal. I finally settled on a refillable leather journal that I can easily pop the pages out of. It was surprisingly helpful to have one consistent place to keep it all.

Now my memory trunk holds those fourteen stacks of thankful lists, and occasionally, I flip through them. Some of the things I wrote bring a smile to my face, others make me reflect on how good God was when I couldn’t see what He was doing, but chose to trust and continue being grateful in the hard.

And that’s my invitation to you. Pay attention. Start small. Write down one thing,
then another, then another. Because life isn’t perfect, but God is still present in it. And as you begin to notice his goodness, even in the places that feel heavy, you may find what I have found again and again—Gratitude does not just change what you see. It changes you.