5 Ways to Notice God's Goodness in an Ordinary Week

Most weeks are ordinary. Nothing dramatic arrives, nothing dramatic leaves, and by Friday you could not say what happened on Tuesday.

Goodness is in those weeks too. It is just quieter than we are trained to look for. Here are five ways to catch it. Psalm 139:14 gives thanks for something nobody had to arrange that week. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, and my soul knows that very well. Knows that very well is the aim here. Noticing is how an ordinary week turns into evidence.

One: Keep a Running List on Your Phone

Start a note and add one line whenever something small goes right. The parking space, the return call, the sentence someone said that helped.

The list works because it is cumulative. Any single line looks trivial. Forty of them by the end of the month look like something else entirely.

Keep it to one line each and resist explaining. The moment the list becomes writing, it stops being something you can do in a supermarket queue, and then it stops happening at all.

Two: Name the Thing That Did Not Happen

Some of the week's goodness is invisible because it consists of trouble that never arrived. The test that came back clear. The car that started.

Once a day, ask what did not go wrong. It feels like a strange question for about three days and then it starts producing answers.

Be careful with this one if you are anxious by temperament, because it can tip into cataloguing everything that might have gone wrong. Ask it once, lightly, and then leave it alone.

Three: Look at One Thing for Sixty Seconds

Pick something ordinary and give it a full minute. The light on the kitchen wall, the shape of a tree you drive past, the face of someone reading.

Attention is most of what noticing requires. Psalm 145:9 says the LORD is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works, which suggests there is more in an ordinary minute than we usually collect.

Four: Ask Someone Else What They Noticed

At dinner, ask what the best part of the day was and mean it. Then listen to the answer without improving it.

Other people see different things than you do. Half of what is good in your week is happening in someone else's account of it.

Ask it of the same person on the same evening each week and you will get better answers. People give thin answers to questions they were not expecting, and fuller ones to questions they knew were coming.

Five: Say One Thank You Out Loud Each Day

Not a list. One specific thing, spoken, at whatever hour you remember.

Out loud is the part that matters. A thought stays mixed in with everything else you are thinking. A spoken sentence is an event, and events are what you remember on Friday.

Say it in a full sentence with the thing named. Thank you for the way that meeting went is a prayer. Thank you for everything is a habit of speech.

Choose One and Do It This Week

Five practices attempted at once is a project. One practice is a habit.

Take the phone list, since it is the easiest to start, and add the first line before you close this page.