Saturday, July 9

To read this morning's office, click here.

If my Jesus of Nazareth class has fifty students, which is the average, I will get to know about five or six students pretty well, I will have short exchanges with most students, and will barely know about 10 of the students. I will know names (though those that don't talk at all tax my name-memory) of nearly all of them. To get to know all of them is exceedingly difficult, and some of them don't want to be known at all.

This is just one class. If the other two classes have fifty students, then the challenge of getting to know students by name and at some level below "I know your name" is impossible.

Compounded it becomes this: after one year I forget many students' names even if I remember some odd bit about them.

God, however, knows each of us. This is more than difficult for us to comprehend: an infinite God, who knows each of us by name, who knows each of us better than we know ourselves, who knows every human being from Siberia to Shanghai, from the North Pole to the South Pole. The mind simply cannot comprehend it, and calculation compounds the problem beyond its capacity.

And I believe (because I could not prove it if I tried) this is easy work for God -- not that it doesn't vex God and pleasure God. God easily knows all of us, God's phone line is never busy, it never has to go "blink" as God shifts to another caller. Indeed, incomprehensible.

But very comforting. So comforting to know that God can hear the gurgles of children when we are asleep and the sighs of children when they are at a distant from us. So comforting to know that in the depths of our problems God loves us and showers his grace upon us. So comforting to know that God will hear us today as we pray for "traveling mercies" as we drive to Indianapolis to pick up our son and comforting to know that others, everyone around us who cares to lift a prayer to the Lord, will sense the same comforts.

I may be small and of little account but the Lord hears -- and it is easy for God to listen.