In the early 1600s a pastor named Martin Rinkert served in the small town of Eilenburg, Germany. Not long after he arrived, the Thirty Years' War broke out and his town was caught in the middle of it. Then the Black Plague swept through. Over eight thousand people in that single town lost their lives. Rinkert buried many of them himself — including his own wife.

Over thirty-two years of ministry he walked through more grief and loss than most of us will ever know.

And in the middle of it he wrote these words:

Now thank we all our God; With heart and hands and voices; Who wondrous things hath done; In whom his world rejoices.

I find that almost incomprehensible. Not because gratitude is impossible in hard times — but because his hard times were so relentlessly, devastatingly hard. And still the praise would not be stifled.

But I wonder if we have it slightly backward when we marvel at Rinkert's gratitude as the outcome of his endurance. What if it was the other way around? What if the gratitude, the paying attention, the deliberate practice of noticing God's faithfulness — what if that was what carried him through? Not the reward at the end of the road, but the sustenance for the journey itself.

Psalm 107 seems to suggest exactly that. Four times the refrain returns — not at the end of the story, but in the middle of it. In the hunger, in the darkness, in the storm — the people cry out, God delivers, and they give thanks. The gratitude is not deferred until things get better. It is woven into the difficulty itself.

Rinkert didn't just survive thirty-two years of loss and then write a hymn. I think he survived partly because he kept writing it — kept paying attention, kept choosing to notice the steadfast love of God even when the evidence of suffering was overwhelming. The gratitude was not the finish line. It was the road.

Psalm 107 ends with this: "Let those who are wise give heed to these things and consider the steadfast love of the Lord."

Consider it. Pay attention to it. Don't let it slip away unnoticed.

Martin Rinkert paid attention — through thirty-two years of loss — and what came out was a profound faith… and  a hymn the church is still singing four centuries later.

Prayer: Holy God, we thank you for those who have chosen gratitude in circumstances far harder than our own. Their witness calls us forward. Teach us to practice gratitude not as a feeling we wait for but as a road we walk — day by day, in the middle of whatever we are facing. May praise rise in us too — stubbornly, faithfully, refusing to let the hard things have the last word. Amen.

‍