We are on His Mind 

            One of the hardest truths for us to accept is that God really does love us and that he does think about us.  David captured this ever-present question in Psalm 8: 4 when he asked, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?”  David looked at God’s creation, and all God had done, and wondered how He even had the time to bother with man. The real question should have been, how could God not be bothered with man?  1 John 4:8 says that God is love.  Understand that this does not mean that He chooses to love us.  He is not the image of love, He is not the idea of love, and He does not embody love.  He is love.  His being is love.  If we were able to look at God’s DNA, and interpret it, we would find nothing but love.  Isn’t that amazing?  He loves us simply because He is love.  That means we can’t be good enough to earn His love, and we cannot be bad enough to lose His love.  Hard to believe, isn’t it?   His love exists because He exists. Doesn’t it leave you awestruck to know that we are on God’s mind?  He is filled with us.  He thinks about us continuously, and He is always orchestrating the events in our lives so that we can become closer to Him.

See I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are

continuously before me.  Is 49:16

            There are times that I can be really forgetful. My schedule keeps me constantly going and I must continuously write things down to keep up with what comes next.  When I don’t have a piece of paper,  I have been known to write information--phone numbers, names, even recipes on my hand, so that it will be virtually impossible for me to forget the information that I need, and where I put it.  God says that we are so important to Him, that He has us engraved on the palms of His hand. Think about that!  Those who still engrave items by hand use a real diamond to cut words or designs into precious metals. A master engraver is highly skilled at his craft. He is intimately acquainted with the tools being used, and the precious metals or woods with which he works.  He carefully, painstakingly takes a nondescript item that has little or no real sustaining value, and turns it into a work of art.   In fact, an image engraved on a surface by a master engraver is unique and cannot be duplicated or counterfeited.  Imagine this:  God thinks that we are so precious to Him that he uses what we consider to be a valuable resource as a tool, to literally cut our names into his hand. In and of ourselves, we have little value in eternity, but He has taken us-- what is some would consider nondescript and of little value, and  He turned it to a work of art.  What is even more than that, he says that He has engraved us on the palm of His hand.  He did not engrave our name or our image. He engraved our being into His being. That means each of us that are hand crafted and uniquely made, so that we are easily distinguished from one another.  We cannot be duplicated or counterfeited, because the Master Engraver has fearfully and wonderfully etched us into his very life form. 

  He goes on to say in Isaiah 49 that our walls are continuously before Him.  This means that He watches carefully the works of our hands, He watches our comings and our goings; He watches our established boundaries, and He watches what we keep as treasures behind our “walls”.  Every detail of our lives is sacred to God, so much so that His eyes are trained to everything that we do, say, think or feel.  For all of us, that could be a scary prospect.  Do we really want God to be privy to our thoughts, and desires?  It really doesn’t matter, because we are engraved on the palm of His hand, nothing –absolutely nothing we can do, say, or imagine can remove us from such a treasured place in Him.  He has made it impossible for Him to forget us.  He reiterates this through Jesus’ prayer before the last supper in John 17.  Jesus prayed that those that were given to Him—those who would believe the message of the cross, would be in Him, as He was in His Father.  We are as one in Him!