A prayer of thanksgiving
The prayer
Lord, today I have not come to ask.
Thank you for the things I never remember to thank you for: water out of the tap, a whole day in which nothing terrible happened, the name of someone I can still say out loud.
Thank you for what I asked for and was given, and for what I asked for and was not given and still do not understand.
Do not let me take this long again.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer of thanksgiving, written for this site and signed. It does not treat gratitude as payment for a request granted: saying thank you buys nothing and was never a condition of anything. Below is the passage about the ten who were cleansed, in which the nine who never returned stayed clean.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
At the end of an ordinary day, after good news, or on the day you notice it has been weeks since you prayed for anything but help.
The first rule on this page is specificity. “Thank you for everything” is comfortable because it obliges you to remember nothing; naming three things from today is harder, and it is the whole exercise. It helps to start with the most ordinary, which are precisely the ones that only become visible once lost: running water, a body that got through the day without asking for attention, a place where you can sleep. People who try this for a week tend to find that the list grows, and not because life improved.
The second rule is the one the rest of this set of pages depends on. This is the sixth prayer in a run about work, debt, exams, journeys and decisions — all of them prayers of request — and it is the only one you pray afterwards. That is exactly why it cannot be treated as a payment. Gratitude is not the consideration owed for an answered request, it does not unlock the next one, and it is not what separates the people who were answered from the people who were not. The nine are the proof of that, and the Gospel lets them go.
One distinction of vocabulary changes everything on a bad day. Paul writes “give thanks in everything”, not “for everything”. Nobody is obliged to be grateful for an illness, a bereavement or a redundancy, and a devotion that demands it produces people performing in front of God. The instruction is about continuing to give thanks inside the circumstance, not about being thankful for the circumstance. That is why the prayer above keeps a line for the request that was not granted and is still unexplained: it belongs in the same text, and it is not resolved there.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
A prayer of thanks is the easiest kind to write badly, because “thank you for everything” fits any day and says nothing about a single one of them. This one was written the other way round, with things named, including the small ones and the ones that are awkward to admit. The tap that ran, the day nothing serious happened, the person you can still call by name. Generic gratitude is a polite way of not looking.
The text holding this page up is Luke 17. Ten lepers ask for pity, Jesus sends them to the priests, and they are cleansed on the way — before any of them turns back. One comes back. Jesus asks where the nine are, and the Gospel never says they lost the healing. What changed happened inside the one who returned, not in what he had received.
This prayer is ours, written for this site, and signed. It deliberately steers clear of the devotional register that treats gratitude as a technique — thanking in order to unlock the next answer, thanking “in advance” for what is still to come. That is prosperity logic with better manners: it turns the thank-you into a payment and a bad day into a failure of execution.
Little-known details
The nine stayed clean
Psalm 103 opens with the psalmist giving himself an order
What the passages say
15And one of them, when he saw that he was cleansed, returned, magnifying God with a loud voice.
16And he fell face down before his feet, giving thanks. And this one was a Samaritan.
17And in response, Jesus said: “Were not ten made clean? And so where are the nine?
18Was no one found who would return and give glory to God, except this foreigner?”
19And he said to him: “Rise up, go forth. For your faith has saved you.”
Read this with attention to what is not written: the healing of the other nine is nowhere revoked. Jesus’ question records an absence, and the closing line is addressed to the one who came back — what he gains is put in a different verb, and it is not the clean skin he already had.
18Give thanks in everything. For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for all of you.
The preposition does all the work: giving thanks in everything is not the same as giving thanks for everything. The text asks for continuity inside the circumstance rather than enthusiasm about it, which is what makes it usable by somebody in the middle of a bad one.
2Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his recompenses.
The psalmist speaks to himself and issues himself an instruction: do not forget. It is the most realistic formulation of gratitude in Scripture, because it starts from the premise that forgetting is the default behaviour of people who have been treated well.
17Let everything whatsoever that you do, whether in word or in deed, be done all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Here gratitude leaves the devotional moment and becomes a way of doing ordinary things — in word and in deed, all day. It is the least ceremonial version of the subject, and the one that survives Monday best.