Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | A mother whose name we don’t know wrote the following,

My little girl went out the door;
I hugged and squeezed her just once more,
Reminding her as oft before,
“Remember to say thank you.”

And then the thought occurred to me,
I’d better check again to see
How long since I on bended knee
Remembered to say thank you.[1]

Pastor Mike Coppersmith tells about a man whose wife had left him, causing him to be severely depressed. He had lost faith in himself, in other people, and in God. One rainy morning the man went to a small neighborhood restaurant for breakfast. He hunched over the counter, stirring his coffee. No one in the diner was speaking to anyone else.

In one of the small booths along the window was a young mother with a little girl. They had just been served their food when the little girl broke the sad silence by saying, “Momma, why don’t we say our prayers here?” The waitress said, “Sure, honey, we can pray here. Will you say the prayer for us?” Then she turned to the rest of the people in the restaurant and said, “Bow your heads.”

Surprisingly, one by one, the heads went down. The little girl then bowed her head, folded her hands, and said, “God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for our food. Amen.”

That simple prayer changed the entire atmosphere in the restaurant. People began to talk with one another. The despondent man said, “All of a sudden, my whole frame of mind started to improve. From that little girl’s example, I started to thank God for all that I did have and stopped majoring in all that I didn’t have. I started to be grateful.”

Scripture instructs us, “Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20). As the mother told her little girl, “Remember to say ‘Thank you.'”

[1] Eugene L. Clark, My Hope (Lincoln, NE: Back to the Bible Publication, 1979), 119.