The Lord's Care

"How can the Lord Jesus Christ think of me, and care for me, and listen to my prayers and answer them, when He has so many millions to think of at the same time? I cannot understand it, and it troubles me a great deal."

So wrote a true, but weak, believer to me not long ago. My reply was "I am like you in one respect. I cannot understand how the Lord can do it. It completely baffles my understanding. But I believe it and so, unlike you, I am untroubled."

I was invited to tea with a dear old man and his wife in Scotland. In the course of our conversation I asked him as to the size of their family. He could not remember, and turned to his wife for help. "How many children have we, dear?" he asked.

"Surely you have not forgotten," she replied, "we have thirteen." And she knew the names of them all and the names of their wives or husbands and of more than forty grandchildren. She was as interested in each as though there were only one.

"I cannot understand how she did it" says the mother whose whole heart and life is wrapped up in one solitary child. Quite so: but the mother's heart expands as her family grows, and there is room in it for them all.

And who shall set a limit to the heart of the Lord? Every one of His sheep has a place within it. He calls His own sheep by name, He tells us. He knows them, not in the mass, but individually, so that each of them can say "He is my Shepherd; the Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me."

Fear not, Christian, for —

"His watchful eye shall keep
Thy pilgrim soul among
The millions of God's sheep."

And no detail of your life is too small for His notice. When He told His disciples that the hairs of their heads were numbered, He meant it. And if you will have it that His language was figurative, be it so. But it simply means that those details of your life that are too insignificant for your notice do not escape His.