Gratitude in the Margins
What if the greatest blessings are the ones we overlook? Discover how God’s mercies appear in the quiet, ordinary moments we stop noticing, and how gratitude can open your eyes again.
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The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
The Overlooked Abundance
Your alarm goes off. You silence it. Maybe hit snooze once or twice, and eventually swing your feet to the floor. The coffee maker gurgles to life. You brush your teeth with water that runs clean and clear. You check your phone. The car starts. Traffic lights turn green. The sun rises, same as it did yesterday, same as it will tomorrow.
Nothing remarkable. Nothing Instagram-worthy. Just another ordinary morning in an ordinary week in an ordinary life.
And we almost always overlook it.
There's a strange irony about the Thanksgiving season. We set aside one day, one meal, one moment to gather and give thanks for our blessings. We go around the table and name the big things—family, health, jobs, homes. Let’s be clear, these are good and important things that are genuinely worth our gratitude.
But what about the other 364 days? What about the 1,000 small daily mercies we received just to make it to that Thanksgiving table? What about the blessings so constant, reliable, and ordinary that we've stopped noticing them altogether?
We're surrounded by gifts we've forgotten to see. We’ve learned to overlook the abundance that we live in. We live in a rush to get to the next big thing, that next achievement, the next milestone, yet we often miss the quiet, steady grace happening in the margins of our lives.
When Miracles Become Mundane
This problem isn’t foreign to the Bible. WE actually see it very early in Scripture. In Exodus, the Israelites are wandering through the desert, and God performs an extraordinary miracle by providing manna —literally bread from heaven —to feed His people. Every single morning, like clockwork, there it was: food appearing on the ground, enough for the day, and sustaining an entire nation.
It was a daily miracle that lasted 40 years.
And you know what happened? They got tired of it. Numbers 11 records their complaint:
"We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” Numbers 11:5-6
The old cliche goes “Variety is the spice of life,” but what other cliche is “Beggars can’t be choosers”?
The Israelites were complaining about the miracle that kept them alive. The very provision that demonstrated God's faithfulness had become so familiar and ordinary that they grew to resent it.
While we’d like to claim a moral superiority here, if we’re truly honest with ourselves, we still do the same thing.
How many blessings show up every day that have become invisible to us? We stop saying thank you for our health until we get sick. We stop noticing the roof over our heads until the storm comes. We stop appreciating the steady relationships until we lose someone.
Familiarity doesn't breed contempt so much as it breeds blindness.
This is what makes Lamentations 3:22-23 so remarkable. These words weren't written from a place of abundance and comfort. Jeremiah penned them while in exile, and experiencing great loss amid the rubble of Jerusalem. The temple was destroyed, the city was gone, and the people were scattered. Everything familiar had been taken away.
Despite the hardship and destruction, Jeremiah wrote: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."
Deep in the throes of devastating loss, Jeremiah chose to see God's mercies. Not the big, dramatic interventions or the miraculous deliverances; Just the mercies. The ones that show up every morning and are new each day. He saw the ones that are so easy to miss when everything else is falling apart.
If Jeremiah could practice gratitude in exile, surely we can practice it in our ordinary days.
God's faithfulness isn't measured only in the mountaintop moments. His faithfulness is also, or maybe that should read especially, measured in the morning mercies. The gifts are so regular, dependable, and woven into the fabric of our daily lives that we take them for granted.
The Small Things Jesus Noticed
Jesus had a way of pointing people toward the blessings hiding in plain sight. In Matthew 6, He tells His anxious disciples to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Look at them, He said. God feeds and clothes them, and you’re worth so much more.
Jesus was teaching us to pay attention. The call was to notice and to see God's care in the small, ordinary details of creation. If God attends to sparrows and wildflowers, how much more does He attend to you?
Yet we overlook those mercies, because, too often, we’re worrying about the big things, striving for the next thing, and about tomorrow's thing. In our worry and striving, we walk right past the evidence of God's faithfulness scattered all around us like manna on the ground.
The Gifts We Forget to Count
What are the blessings in the margins of your life? The ones you don't think to put on your gratitude list because they're just... there?
The gift of ordinary days.
Days when nothing dramatic happens. When you wake up without pain, go about your work, and come home safe. Days that are boring, predictable, and unmemorable. We often pray for better days, more exciting days, more significant days. But ordinary days are a gift too—the gift of stability, routine, and the absence of crisis.
The gift of steady relationships.
Not the friendships that are always exciting or dramatic, but the ones that are reliable. The person who shows up consistently. The friend who remembers to check in. The family member who's been there so long you forget they're a gift. We celebrate the grand romantic gestures and the life-changing connections, but sometimes the greatest blessing is someone who's simply present, year after year, in the unspectacular middle of life.
The gift of infrastructure.
This one sounds unspiritual, but stay with me. The electricity that powers your home. The clean water that flows from your tap. The roads you drive on. The systems that allow you to work, communicate, and live. Behind all of these are countless people you'll never meet, including engineers, workers, and public servants, whose labor makes your daily life possible. Even the society we live in, with all its flaws, is a gift compared to the chaos and danger so many in the world face.
The gift of small comforts.
A hot shower. A comfortable bed. A warm meal. These aren't luxuries to billions of people in human history—they're unimaginable riches. Yet we experience them daily and barely pause to consider them.
The gift of spiritual mercies.
Here's perhaps the most overlooked blessing: the quiet, consistent ways God ministers to us that we often don't even recognize. The song on the radio that spoke exactly to your situation. The Bible verse that came to mind just when you needed it. The gentle conviction of the Holy Spirit. The peace that surpassed understanding in a moment of anxiety. The ability to pray, to worship, to sense God's presence. These are extraordinary gifts that have become ordinary to us.
How to Practice Margin Gratitude
So, how do we train our eyes to see these blessings? How do we cultivate gratitude for the gifts in the margins?
Start with attentiveness.
Gratitude requires awareness. We can't give thanks for what we don't notice. This means slowing down enough to pay attention. It means resisting the pull of busyness, distraction, and constant forward momentum long enough to look around and see what God has already provided.
Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century monk, practiced what he called "the presence of God" by finding God in the mundane tasks of monastery life, such as washing dishes, sweeping floors, and preparing meals.
"We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before Him.” Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God and The Spiritual Maxims
You don't have to be a monk to practice this. You can give thanks while brushing your teeth, while waiting at a red light, while walking to your car. The point isn't to make gratitude one more thing on your to-do list, but to weave thanksgiving into the fabric of your everyday life.
Name the overlooked.
Try this: For one week, keep a running list on your phone of the "margin blessings" you notice. Not the big stuff, but the small, incremental stuff. The thank-you text from a friend. The fact that your back didn't hurt today (or maybe for the Ibuprofen to ease an ailing back!). The way the sunlight came through your window. The stranger who held the door.
When you start naming these things, something shifts. You begin to see that your life isn't ordinary at all, but is saturated with grace.
Pray with specificity.
Instead of generic prayers of thanks, get specific about the small things.
"Thank you, God, for safe travel today."
"Thank you, God, for the conversation I had with my coworker."
"Thank you, God, that my child woke up healthy this morning."
Specific gratitude trains your heart to notice specific blessings.
Reframe the familiar.
Ask yourself: What would I miss if it were gone? Your health, yes. Your family, yes. But also: your morning coffee. Your favorite chair. The sound of your neighbor's voice. The particular way your spouse laughs. These things are easy to take for granted until they're no longer there. Don't wait until they're gone to appreciate them.
The Gospel in the Margins
Here's what we often miss: The gospel itself is a margin blessing. Not in the sense that it's small or insignificant, because it’s the most important truth in the universe. But in the sense that it's so readily available and continually offered, we can become numb to it.
The cross isn't a dramatic one-time event we celebrate once a year at Easter. It's the foundation of every moment of our lives. Every sin forgiven and every moment in God's presence is a gift of grace purchased by Jesus Christ. It's all grace, all the time, all around us.
We can become so familiar with this gospel that we stop marveling at it. We can talk about Jesus's sacrifice with the same emotional energy we use to discuss the weather. We can pray "in Jesus' name" without pausing to consider what that name cost Him and what it secured for us.
The greatest tragedy isn't missing the small blessings in your daily life. The greatest tragedy is missing the greatest blessing altogether—the one that makes all the other blessings meaningful. The one that transforms ordinary days into opportunities for worship. The one that turns every mercy into evidence of God's faithful love.
Salvation through Jesus Christ is the ultimate overlooked abundance. It's the manna we walk past every day, the provision we complain about while searching for something more exciting, the faithfulness we forget to thank God for because it's been there as long as we can remember.
Don't let familiarity rob you of wonder. The fact that you've heard the gospel a thousand times doesn't make it any less miraculous. The fact that God's love has been consistent doesn't make it any less remarkable. The fact that His mercies are new every morning doesn't mean we should stop being amazed that morning comes at all.
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