He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” Psalm 147:4

I love summer with its seemingly endless sunshine and merry times of fellowship, but there is no denying that when the air turns crisp in early mornings and evenings a sense of delight and wonder ignites as the sweaters are unfolded.

On one of the crisper nights this week, my husband and I went outdoors to enjoy the stars in the clear dark sky. We sat in silence for awhile enjoying the beauty of the heavens. Psalm 19:1 seemed to strike both our hearts in a fresh way as we reveled in some of God’s nocturnal glory. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

I broke our awed silence by asking, “Isn’t strange how looking at the stars can make you feel so small, but so precious at the same time?”. His answer was, “I was just thinking the same thing”. Sitting there that night, we were humbled by the visual reminded that though there are 200 billion galaxies held together declaring God’s creativity and power, and nestled inside one of those galaxies lies a planet called earth where God’s beloved children live and breathe and have their being, and He is intimately concerned with the details of our lives.

Our thoughts were basically a paraphrase of Psalm 8:3-4 “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

The fact that the Creator of heaven and earth stepped out of perfection into the squallers or humanity to save it is amazing. But when I am reminded, truly reminded, that I was one of those filthy pigs in the pig pen of sin and death that desperately needed rescue, and rescue came with His very own new and bright star to announce His arrival, not just for humanity at large, but for me. Now, that is humbling.

Sometimes I think we forget how important we are to our Father. We aren’t important because of the career we have, the family we hail from, or the affiliations with our churches, but we are important as beloved children to a loving Father who gave us life intentionally with the full desire to know us and love us and to be known and loved by us in return.

When we get tempted to forget how much the Father loves us, watches over us, and cares for our well-being, and our development into Christlikeness, let us remember the Revelation of John where he tells us that we will all receive a white stone with a new name on it. That name is known only to God and will be bestowed to us as a reward for following Him through all the temporal days of our lives on earth.

The Father not see you? The Father not care about your situation. The Father not give you direction, wisdom, or insight? Please, don’t give in to those lies from the enemy.

Right now, He knows the new name Him will bequeath to you at the end of all things- in the new heaven and new earth. All your struggles, all your victories, all your desires, all your submission, all His love and all His faithfulness are always working to bring about your good and His glory.

Think of a taffy pull. Taffy is stretched and folded repeatedly. The process seems to go on and on: stretching and folding, stretching an folding, but the end result is a sweet piece of candy. The long process is needed to incorporate air for a more pleasant candy in the end. Our Father isn’t disconnected of blind to what our lives on earth look like. He is so attuned that perhaps our very names in heaven will reflect what He sees displayed in us while we live life on this earth. The stretch, pull, and folding of our lives on earth is necessary to make us more like Christ, and the Father sees it all.

The Father doesn’t need the James Webb Space Telescope, which folds like origami to find us through the maze of galaxies. We are the apple of His eye always before Him. “For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him…”2 Chronicles 16:9