Size and Worth

Photo by Manuel Will on Unsplash

One of the foundations of prayer is the idea that God listens to each of us and cares about each of us. If God weren’t listening, or if God didn’t care, why would we pray? We take that for granted every time we turn to God with our worries, our gratitude, or our questions.

And yet, a lot of people struggle with the idea that God pays attention and cares so much about each one of us. Many faithful Christians, even, find themselves asking the same question the psalmist asked:

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—

the moon and the stars you set in place—

what are mere mortals that you should think about them,

human beings that you should care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

Yes, Jesus said that your heavenly Father cares about you so much that he knows how many hairs are on your head. (Matthew 10:29-31) But when you consider how big the universe is and how insignificant we seem in the grand scheme of things, some of us still wonder. And the psalmist couldn’t have realized just how far the night sky stretches. I read the other day that, if you shrank the Earth’s entire path around the sun down to the size of a ring on a girl’s finger, then the next closest star to us would be twenty miles away. I don’t think we can really comprehend just how vast the universe is. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote, thinking about all of our griefs, losses, and struggles, “What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?” It’s not difficult to understand where he was coming from.

But do scope and scale really tell us about God’s concerns and God’s heart?

I love what Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote about all of this in The Meaning of Prayer:

But surely, we ourselves are not accustomed to judge comparative value by size. As children we may have chosen a penny rather than a dime because the penny was larger; but as maturity arrives, that basis of choice is outgrown…A mother’s love for her baby is not a matter of pounds and ounces. When one believes in God at all, the consequence is plain. God must have at least our spiritual insight to perceive the difference between size and worth.

Your size doesn’t determine your worth. The universe is unimaginably vast, and we, in comparison, are miniscule, short-lived things. But, just like we delight in the flash of a lightning bug or the touch of a kiss, God delights in things that are small and fleeting—like you and me. The Lord values us, the dust of the earth, like we value the tiniest pieces of diamond dug out of the ground.

That’s why, in another psalm, the writer can ask, “Does he who fashioned the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see?” (94:9) And he knows the answer. He assumes we know the answer.

Yes, he hears me.

Yes, he sees me.

Yes, he loves me.

So we can pray, affirming all kinds of things at once.

I am small.

I am brief.

I am valuable.

I am his delight.

You can listen to this week's devotional here: