Copyright © 2005 by Desmond Tutu
“God says to you, ‘I have a dream. Please help me to realize it.’ It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts.”
Many of us can acknowledge that God cares about the world but can’t imagine that God would care about you or me individually. But our God marvelously, miraculously cares about each and every one of us.
The Bible has this incredible image of you, of me, of all of us, each one, held as something precious, fragile in the palms of God’s hands. And that you and I exist only because God is forever blowing God’s breath into our being. And so God says to you, “I love you. You are precious in your fragility and your vulnerability. Your being is a gift. I breathe into you and hold you as something precious.”
But why, we ask in our disbelief and despair, would God care about me? The simple reason is that God loves you.
God loves you as if you were the only person on earth.
God, looking on us here, does not see us as a mass. God knows us each by name.
God says, “Your name is engraved on the palms of My hands.” You are so precious to God that the very hairs of your head are numbered. “Can a mother,” God asks, “forget the child she bore?” That is a most unlikely thing, quite unnatural, but it could happen.
God says, even if that most unlikely thing were to happen, God’s love wouldn’t allow Him to forget you or me. We are those precious things that God carries gently.
God carries each one of us as if we were fragile because God knows that we are. You are precious to God. God cares for you.
Many people believe that they are beyond God’s love–that God may love others but that what they have done has caused God to stop loving them. But Jesus by his example showed us that God loves sinners as much as saints.
All that we are, all that we have, is a gift of God. God’s love for you is immutable and unalterable, whether you are good or bad. Our God is here for us whenever we are ready to hear His still small voice in our lives.
