I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds. Your ways, God, are holy. What god is as great as our God?—Psalm 77:11–13 (NIV)

Have you ever started looking for a particular model of car and then found that everywhere you look, you see one? Or maybe you learned a new word, and now you encounter it in the podcasts you listen to or read it in the newspaper? No, it’s not just AI and Google reading our minds. It actually has a name—the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusion.

Psychology Today describes it as a cognitive bias in which we learn something new and then suddenly seem to encounter it everywhere. In reality, we’re simply more aware of it because we’ve recently noticed it.

Ultimately, it means what we focus on is what we tend to see.

What We Choose to Focus On

In life, our tendency is to focus on problems. And the more we see them, the more we find them. We are in good company—think about the Israelites. Even when they were being rescued from Egypt, they often focused on what they didn’t have or their fears rather than how big their God was and how He would provide for their needs.

We do the same thing. Our problems begin to overshadow the good things in our lives. The more we complain to our coworker about our boss, the more we find our boss’s actions irritating. A conversation with a friend about how the waitress messed up our dinner order and the rudeness of the customer service agent turns into a conversation about how the whole world is falling apart.

This grumbling—it’s contagious. And it can lead to excessive worry, fear, and anxiety.

I don’t deny that it’s challenging to feel gratitude when all we can see are the hardships. We look at those difficulties and wonder why they are happening to us. There are times when we feel overwhelmed. Everywhere we look, there’s another problem, and we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I get it. Been there. Done that. A million times.

But I can assure you that there is light in the midst of what we are dealing with,

and His name is Jesus.

What we must remember is that our attention can work the other way, too. If we choose to focus on the good, then we will begin to notice good things all around us. It is all a matter of perspective.

Remembering God’s Faithfulness

The psalmist understood this as well. Even in the midst of his distress, he chose to stop and remember who God was and what He had done.

I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. (Psalm 77:11, NIV)

If you are like me, you can look back and see the hand of God all over your life. So many times He has rescued me and protected me. Those hardships we got through last year or last month are all reminders that God is always with us and will never leave us (Hebrews 13:5).

In the midst of challenging times, looking for the good isn’t easy, but the more we remember what God has done to help us, while also looking around at the beauty in our everyday lives, the more those things become our focus.

It’s like tuning into a radio station—we have to tune our hearts to remember the goodness of God. He is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love (Psalm 103:8).

Choosing to Give Thanks

Friends, it’s easier to complain than give thanks. That is just the reality of our broken world. But we can intentionally choose to give thanks. We can recall all the ways God has been good to us and trust that He will continue to be good because He never changes (James 1:17; Malachi 3:6).

Recently, during my morning quiet time, one of my journal prompts was:

Lord, I give You thanks because…

As I took time to remember all that the Lord has done for me, I filled a whole page with statements like these:

Lord, I give You thanks because You are a good God.
Lord, I give You thanks because You rescued me.
Lord, I give You thanks because You provided for me in my time of need.
Lord, I give You thanks…and so on.

The more I wrote things out, the easier it became. By the end of the page, my heart was full of gratitude for all the ways God had cared for me and the world around me.

Might I encourage you today to grab a notebook and begin to answer that prompt? What can you give God thanks for today?

Think back over your life and remember God’s faithfulness.