A simple act

I read a story somewhere recently. I don't remember where or much of the story except for this:

The story is told by a son in the olden days before there was central heating.

Every morning his father would get up before the rest of the family in the winter and put wood in the wood stove and light it so that his family could get up and it wouldn't find getting up so bone-chilling cold. Every morning during winter, the father silently got up and lit the fire.

The son who is now married and in his own home thinks about his father who always lit the fire in the freezing cold so those who woke after him would not have to shiver. And the son cannot think of one time that anyone in his family ever thanked his father. This simple repeated act of his father's caring for his family was taken as a matter of course. It was so daily and so natural that his father's lighting the fire faded into the background, the same way we don't thank the ground we put our feet on the sky for being above us every day or the sun for rising? They're just all supposed to serve us every day.

Of course, now the son wishes he had even once thanked his father.

Forgive me for adding a moral to this story. There is no need. Did this story too make you think of how it is like this for God, the silent faithful Father who never goes to sleep in order to serve His children.