It was the first item on my “thankful list” that my wife, Lori, and I share each morning. That day, we both listed the microwave we had bought the day before.
We had been without a microwave for only a few days, but we had forgotten how dependent we were on it: warming a cup of coffee or tea, cooking frozen vegetables, reheating leftovers from the day before.
It’s like so many things we take for granted. Maybe you remember the electricity going out. Ahh, to have hot water again and lights at the touch of a finger.
Maybe you’ve been without your cell phone. People are so dependent on little mobile computers that, without them, many suffer from nomophobia—the very real anxiety of being cut off from a screen we didn’t know we’d married ourselves to.
So, our microwave, top of the list.
But within a few days, we didn’t think to be thankful for it, just like that shower with hot water I relished when the electricity came back on. We drift towards ingratitude. We lapse into an attitude of expectation.
For weeks after each visit with my brother who suffered with ALS, I would return thanking God that I could walk outside on my own will and look up at the stars, or exercise, or empty the trash. It would take a mere matter of days before I forgot the privilege of those things.
That’s why Lori and I consistently list our five to seven daily items for which we are grateful. An attitude of gratitude engenders humility as we recognize how much we receive that we did nothing to earn.
Scripture doesn’t only call us to thank God for the mountaintop moments — the answered prayer, the healed relationship, the long-awaited job. It calls us to gratitude in the small, ordinary furniture of a day. Paul, writing from a prison cell with far less than a microwave to his name, tells the Philippians to make their requests known to God “with thanksgiving” (Philippians 4:6) — not thanksgiving reserved for the big things, but woven into the asking itself. The Psalms go further still: “This is the day that the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24). Not someday. Not when things improve. This day — the one with the reheated coffee and the working lamp switch. Even Jesus, before breaking a few loaves and fish into a meal for thousands, paused first to give thanks for what little was already in hand (John 6:11). He didn’t wait for abundance to be grateful. He was grateful, and the abundance followed.
I think that’s the order we tend to get backward. We assume gratitude is the response to a full life, when Scripture suggests it might be the doorway to one. The widow who gave her two small coins wasn’t thanked by Jesus for the size of the gift, but noticed for the size of the trust behind it (Mark 12:41-44). Smallness was never the obstacle to gratitude. It may be gratitude’s native habitat.
So maybe the microwave isn’t a small thing after all. Maybe nothing we’re given is. Lori and I will keep our list — five to seven items, most days more ordinary than remarkable: a good night’s rest, crisp morning air, fresh home-grown tomatoes from the local market, grown children who still call just to talk. None of it earned. All of it received.
If gratitude fades within days of the electricity coming back on, then maybe the answer isn’t to wait for bigger blessings to keep the feeling alive. Maybe it’s to keep writing down the small ones, on purpose, every single morning — until noticing them becomes as automatic as reaching for the microwave door.
Thanks be to God. Even for that.