A while back my dad was teaching Sunday School and commented that God is so big He can give us each His attention. I want to talk about that.
Sometimes we act like God created everything and just left it to run on its own. We act like God doesn’t care as much as He said He does. Sometimes we act like God is as human as we are, and that sometimes He’s too busy or preoccupied to be bothered with our problems. But if you know your Bible you know that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. He is entirely able to pay attention to everyone and everything at once. God can guide the grander themes of history as well as our individual lives, and cares just as much about both. At one point Jesus said that God even keeps track of sparrows, and we’re more important than they are (Matthew 10:29-31, Luke 12:6-7). That reference alone says quite a bit about God’s attention.
Sometimes I think about how God keeps track of how interconnected everything is in the world. People I know are acquainted with people I don’t know, who also know other people I don’t know, but I might know a few other people connected to those last people, and each of all these people has a life of their own that they are living as they will. Every decision each human makes is an intricate detail in the grand tapestry of human history, and God knows exactly where and how each thread is woven. He weaves into it Himself. There is a vast, interconnected web in the world greater than any interconnected universe any writer has made, and God knows each detail, strand, and junction.
Because of my finite human brain I am completely amazed at all God can pay attention to at once. Knowing that God is infinite, all this “keeping track” isn’t difficult for Him in the slightest, yet it still amazes me. I’ve felt God’s personal attention before (and really I have it whether or not I feel it), and all the while He was still keeping track of and working in people’s lives and in human history. All the while He was paying personal attention to other people as well. That’s dumbfoundingly wondrous to me, and makes me feel overwhelmingly loved. It shows me just how much God loves everyone.
God is big enough to give you His attention.