Start With the Toothbrush

SUMMARY: When gratitude feels impossible, start small. A short devotional on giving thanks in the hard season, even when the only word you can find is "toothbrush."

One of the lowest weeks of my life, I opened a gratitude journal to list out what I'm grateful for and sat there a long time trying to find something to write. I finally managed one word. Toothbrush. Then I cried about it.

Here's what I want you to hear if you're in a season where gratitude feels impossible: the verse says give thanks in all circumstances, not for them. The preposition is the whole thing. You don't have to be grateful this happened to you. You only have to find one true thing inside the day and name it. Mine was a toothbrush, and it counted.

"Give thanks in all circumstances." — 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (NIV)

For a long time, I misunderstood gratitude. I thought being grateful meant finding something good to say about what was happening to me. That if I really trusted God, I should be able to look at a painful season and somehow call it a blessing. But when you're grieving, disappointed, heartbroken, or simply trying to survive a life that looks nothing like the one you prayed for, that kind of gratitude can feel impossible. Worse, it can make you feel guilty for hurting in the first place.

But gratitude doesn't require us to lie. You don't have to call heartbreak good. You don't have to be thankful for the loss. You don't have to pretend the unanswered prayer doesn't hurt or rush to tell everyone what God is teaching you through it. There is room in faith for both gratitude and grief. You can thank God for what remains while still mourning what was lost.

That realization changed the way I understood gratitude in dark seasons. Instead of asking myself to find something beautiful about the entire season, I started looking for something true inside the day. And some days, the truth was very small: a meal I could eat, a friend who checked on me, a few hours of sleep, sunlight coming through the window, enough strength to get through another day. None of those things fixed what was broken. They didn't answer my questions or change the circumstances I was desperately asking God to change. But they reminded me that darkness had not swallowed everything.

I think that's one of the quiet gifts of gratitude. It doesn't necessarily pull us out of the dark; sometimes it simply helps our eyes adjust enough to notice what the darkness hasn't taken. Pain has a way of becoming enormous. When something hurts deeply enough, it can begin to occupy our entire field of vision. The thing that ended, the prayer that hasn't been answered, the future that suddenly looks different—it can start to feel like the truest thing about our lives.

Gratitude gently reminds us that it isn't. It allows us to say, Yes, this hurts, and this is also true. I am grieving, and I was loved today. I don't know what comes next, and I had what I needed for this moment. God hasn't answered the prayer the way I hoped, and He has not stopped being present. My life does not look the way I wanted it to, and there are still gifts here. Gratitude doesn't erase one truth to make room for another. It teaches us how to hold both.

Maybe that's why my toothbrush mattered so much that day. It wasn't profound. It certainly wasn't the kind of thing I imagined writing in a gratitude journal. But in a season when so much felt uncertain, painful, and beyond my control, there it was: one small piece of evidence that not everything was gone.

And sometimes, when you're in the dark, one true thing is enough.

You don't need a list of ten things today. You don't need to feel overwhelmingly grateful. You don't need to manufacture a silver lining or figure out what God is doing with your story. Just look around and ask yourself, What is still here? Maybe it's coffee. Maybe it's the person who answered when you called. Maybe it's a bed to crawl into tonight. Maybe it's the fact that you made it through a day you weren't sure you could make it through. Name it. Thank God for it. And let that be enough for today.

Reflect

What's your toothbrush today—one small, true thing you can be grateful for, even if you can't be grateful for the season itself?

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