The notebook · July 27, 2026

Naming Three Things

For a week now I have been doing a tiny exercise. In the evening, before I put the phone down, I name three things from the day I can say thank you for. Three, no more. It takes less than a minute, and I did not think it would count for much.

The first evenings were laborious. I found the first without trouble — a genuinely good moment, something obvious. The second already took an effort. The third, some evenings, I scraped together: the morning coffee, a sentence I overheard, the fact that it had not rained. I nearly gave up, telling myself it was forced, that counting small things to make up the number had nothing spiritual about it.

And then something shifted, but not where I expected. It was not the evening the exercise changed: it was the day. Around midweek I caught myself, in the middle of the afternoon, noticing a thing and thinking there, that one, maybe that will do for tonight. Without meaning to, I had started hunting. Looking at the day with the eye of someone searching for something to give thanks for. And you find what you look for: on the days I watch for the third thing, there are ten.

What unsettles me a little is realizing how far my attention had been set the other way. Left alone, I spot by instinct what is missing, what went wrong, the remark that landed badly. It is as if the eye, to itself, leans toward the deficit. The exercise does not make me naive — the things that are missing are still missing. It only forces me to look at the other column too, the one I was not keeping.

Paul writes to the Thessalonians: “In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). For a long time that verse struck me as excessive, almost insulting to those going through the worst. I read it differently now. It does not ask us to give thanks for all things — not to say thank you for evil. It is in all things: in the middle of them, even the bad days, to find the three. Not to deny the rest, but to keep it from taking up all the room.

Tonight it will be easy, I already know: I have two of them held since noon.

In Manna, this evening’s memory question will do roughly this work for me — I only have to answer it honestly.