I found myself walking through one of the hardest seasons of my life. It was the kind of season where I’d wake up blissfully unaware for a few seconds before reality came crashing back in. And once it did, I carried the weight of it all day.

Maybe you know the kind of season I’m talking about. Life keeps moving even though part of you wishes you could hit pause. Lunches still need packing, emails need answering, bills need paying, and people still need you. The world doesn’t stop just because yours is falling apart.

Back then, I wasn’t thinking about healing or what life might look like on the other side. I was simply trying to get through the day.

A daily walk became one of the few things that helped. I can still picture one day in particular: pushing my toddler in the stroller through our neighborhood with Lysa TerKeurst in my earbuds, when she said something that literally stopped me on the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s house.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time heals what you plant.

Wait. Time doesn’t heal all wounds? I’d been counting on that! I’d been checking off the days, hoping enough distance between me and what had happened would eventually make everything hurt less.

But standing on that sidewalk, I realized I had been so focused on surviving the season I was in that I hadn’t really thought about what I was planting in it. Simply getting through another day was never going to give me the peace, joy, and healing I longed for. If I wanted that kind of fruit, I needed to start planting the right seeds.

That moment became a turning point in my healing journey. And one of the first seeds I started planting was gratitude.

Looking for Good in the Middle of the Hardest Seasons

Honestly, gratitude didn’t come naturally in that season. There were plenty of things I wasn’t grateful for, and I wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise. But Scripture tells us that even in hard circumstances, we can still choose gratitude.

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

(1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV)

There’s one small word in that verse that makes a big difference. It doesn’t say to give thanks for all circumstances. It says to give thanks in them.

I didn’t have to be grateful for the hard things in my life to notice the good that was still there. So I started to wonder, what if I stopped staring at everything that felt broken and uncertain and looked for something good instead?

I decided to try a simple practice. Every day, I wrote down three specific things I was grateful for.

And when I say specific, I mean specific. I couldn’t just write “my family” every day, even though I’m deeply grateful for them. Instead, whatever I wrote down had to come from that day, which meant paying attention to the life happening right in front of me and noticing the little moments I might otherwise have missed.

It became almost like a scavenger hunt for God’s goodness. Some days it was lighting a candle at the end of a long day, a patient cashier while I was running errands, or a crisp, ice-cold fountain Diet Coke. (Yes, that one is straight from my own list.)

When You Start Looking, You Start Seeing

Somewhere along the way, something shifted.

My circumstances hadn’t changed. The hard things were still hard. But I started to notice they weren’t the only things happening in my life. There was goodness there, too.

I found unexpected laughter, tiny kindnesses, and beautiful ordinary moments. Evidence of God’s provision and care was all around me, and I might have completely missed it if I’d never looked up from the hard stuff.

Those little lists taught me this: when you write down specific things you’re grateful for each day, you train your heart to notice the goodness tucked inside your ordinary life. And the more you pay attention, the more you see.

Friend, if you’re walking through a hard season right now, maybe gratitude is a seed you can start planting today, too. You don’t have to feel grateful for everything. Grab a notebook (or the notes app on your phone) and write down three specific things from today. Tomorrow, do it again.

Not because everything in your life is good right now, but because even in the hardest seasons, goodness remains. God is still faithful, and there are still gifts worth noticing.

Every time we stop long enough to notice God’s goodness, we’re planting something. Little by little, those seeds of gratitude change more than what we see. They change our hearts.

Meet Teressa Shrewsbury

Where to find her . . .

• Website
• Instagram (Encouragement for Busy Women)
• Facebook (Encouragement for Busy Women)
• Connect with Teressa personally (via Instagram)

Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.

If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.