While on mission in India, I made a quiet resolution with the brothers and sisters there: to write one line of gratitude each day. For one full year devoted to the gospel, we wanted to remain mindful of God’s tireless work on our behalf—His daily love, His constant care—and respond with thanks, one line at a time.
In the beginning, it felt almost too easy. In a foreign land, every challenge led us to pray, and every answered prayer stirred immediate gratitude. A safe flight into India, finding a home that suited our needs, meeting a soul with a deep thirst for the Word, blessings poured in abundance . . . my daily line of thanks often spilled into two, sometimes three. I simply shrank my handwriting to make it all fit.
But as the unfamiliar became routine, I began to let the habit slip. “I’ll write it tomorrow,” I told myself. But tomorrow turned into the day after, and that into a week.
Catching up was harder than I thought. I’d stare at the calendar, trying to recall what had happened on each day. Surely something worthy of thanks had taken place, but I couldn’t remember. And soon, it felt as if there had been nothing worth noting at all. Eventually, I found myself unable to write even a single line. Where gratitude faded, complaints crept in. I became more irritable, and more regretful only to wonder later why such trivial things had unsettled me so deeply.
That was when I remembered the resolution I had made at the start of this mission: to learn thankfulness and contentment through every experience here. So I began again. This time, I kept track of each day in my phone’s diary—who I met, what I did, how I felt—and marked each entry with emojis to reflect my mood. When I sat down to write in my thanksgiving journal, I would read back through my log and try to write with sincerity, even if it was just a single line.
Slowly, gratitude returned to my daily rhythm. Complaints that once cluttered my heart gave way to clarity. Reading the journals of others helped me see blessings I had overlooked. Even when we experienced the same events, each person offered a unique lens of thankfulness—and that helped all of us give deeper, more genuine thanks. Above all, I came to realize: not a single day had passed without something to be thankful for. In that simple but profound truth, I felt anew the love of our heavenly Father and Mother.
As the saying goes, “We are what we repeatedly do.” A heart trained in gratitude is the mark of a true child of God. So from this day forward, I will continue to give thanks not only for the milestones, but for the smallest mercies and quietest joys. Father and Mother, thank You.
Today’s one-line journal of thanks—complete.