Your Thoughts About Me
We are journeying through Psalm 139. To read the previous reflection, click here.
How difficult it is for me to fathom your thoughts about me, O God!
How vast is their sum total.
If I tried to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
Even if I finished counting them,
I would still have to contend with you.
Psalm 139:17-18
Even if I finished counting them.
Someone thinks about things like how many grains of sand are there on earth, and inquiring minds want to know the number. Scientists estimate there are approximately 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the earth. That’s 7,500,000,000,000,000,000.
The average human life span is 72.6 years. That equals 38,158,560 minutes.
God’s thoughts toward us far outreach the sum total of all the minutes of our lives. His thoughts are set on eternity, for He created us immortal. We are meant to be known and loved for all our existence, even beyond time.
I have known people who I today no longer really know. Have I known anyone all the minutes of my life? My mother, perhaps. Yet I cannot recall those early thoughts of infancy.
To whom can we compare our God? To what power can we contrast His thoughts toward us? How small we are, how minuscule our thoughts, even as we try to count the grains of sand on the earth..
I want to know God’s thoughts toward me. I can at least seek them out day by day, over the years of my life on this spinning globe. And just one of His magnificent thoughts per day might be all I can truly comprehend, if that.
His thought toward me came kindly, unexpectedly, to me this morning as I nursed a miserable cold and tried to think thoughts past the pain in my chest and the cough wracking my body. Like the fine note of a flute its song lifted my heart from the physical limitations laying me so very low and bid me fly with hope.
Thy God hath sent forth strength for thee.
The lifting words were found as I was reading, or trying to read, the dear old book by Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean’s Watch. The clockmaker and the Dean of the Cathedral were examining an exquisite engraving on the inner workings of the Dean’s heirloom family watch. The words from Psalm 68:28 were his family’s motto.
They became my motto for today too, all because the Lord thinks thoughts toward you and me, for He loves us so.
Let us pay attention, even when we are bound by these limited bodies and the agonies of a world at war.
In this life of mine, I get to hear stories of men, women, and children who hear His thoughts toward them in the secret places of suffering, in prisons, in hospitals, on mats in a fly-infested courtyard. Yet He is there, thinking, and loving the least of these.
He is thinking toward you and me today as surely as the sun rises. And He shall never stop!
Lord, thank You for being the Initiator of all Good Thoughts toward me. I am so grateful to be thought of, and loved. Amen.
Photo by Jill Heyer on Unsplash
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