This week there will likely be voices that speak into who you are and who you can and cannot be. Some words will soar through the airwaves and into our hearts through relationship, through conversations. Whether intentional or unintentional, some voices will speak life over us and others will speak limitations. And then some will reemerge in the silence, through memories, where both joy and sorrow, happiness and hurt live. Author Bob Goff says "Words people say not only have a shelf life but have the ability to shape life." So before we take the temperature of the week, before we let the past or the present define who we are, where we're going and who we are capable of becoming let's remember there is only One voice who speaks into our lives with the intimate knowledge of every second of our history and every hidden measure of our hope and in a sea of faces, in a noisy world of seven billion people God gets very personal.
"If each grain of sand on the seashore were numbered
and the sum labeled “chosen of God,”
They’d be numbers still, not names...
God doesn’t count us; he calls us by name.
Arithmetic is not his focus."
-Romans 9:27,28 (The Message)
In a culture where ones and zeros, schedules, budgets and business plans rule the modern day, how incredible to remember we are not a number to God. We're a name. We're an unrepeatable story. We're a heartbeat, a unique fingerprint, an ordained purpose and we are unforgettable in the very eyes of God.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or lack compassion for the child of her womb?
Even if these forget,
yet I will not forget you."
Isaiah 49:15
In a world that fills up every second of every day with the noise of life we need divine interruption: a still small voice to lead, instruct and affirm us as we move through life and all its circumstances. God is still WITH us, FOR us and He will not waiver in His commitment to finish the good work He has started.