How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand; when I awake, I am still with Thee. Psalm 139:17-18
This week, I was gotten for a moment. I went to the mailbox, expecting to see junk mail and bills, but, instead, there was an envelope addressed by a feeble hand. I saw the return address and recognized the name as a dear saint from our hometown, whom we also attended church with regularly. This was very unusual, as we had never received mail from her before. So, I hurriedly opened the envelope to find a card inside. With her own hands, she had penned words to encourage us and to let us know how much she enjoyed getting to see us on her “telephone”, as we have been having to minister through social media since the start of this pandemic that has swept our world. So many thoughts raced through my mind. How sweet. What a thoughtful thing to do. But, then, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of awe-inspiring thankfulness. Tears filled my eyes as I considered the thoughtfulness, especially in today’s time, of taking a moment to write down words in a card, finding the address of the recipient, and mailing it out, just to let someone know they were thinking about you. Without thinking, I said out loud, “Thank you, Lord, for precious things.”
To some, this act may seem small and even insignificant, but it is not. This lady may never know how deeply this act touched me on that day. She may never realize how loved I felt in that moment, to think that someone thought enough of us to send us that card and to say those kind words. It is these small, insignificant things that I believe we have forgotten about in recent years, or maybe decades. The love notes between lovers, the thoughtful gestures of kindness between strangers on the street, the waving of hands to passerby’s regardless of your affiliation with them. After all, it is the small things we often neglect to be thankful for, and thus, it is those things we often lose sight of doing.
When this thought came to me, I began looking in my concordance for the word “precious”, and to my surprise, “precious things” was actually in the book of Deuteronomy several times. It is stated in Chapter 33, when Moses is giving his blessings upon the children of Israel before his death. To the tribe of Joseph, he states many times, “precious things”. Moses mentions precious things four different times in his blessing to Joseph, and it is only in his blessing to Joseph that this phrase is uttered. Other Bible translations change this phrase to “finest” and “choicest” or “best”. How peculiar. For, when I was thinking of the precious things, I was thinking of the simple joy that comes from hearing the laughter of a child or watching a kitten play tirelessly with string or with air. I wasn’t thinking of things of grandeur or finery. To my heart, precious is something that cannot be measured. It is something that invokes a feeling inside your heart that cannot be described and an emotion that cannot be replicated by any other means. We often think of things that are precious as things that are small in the eyes of the world, but in reality, they are truly the greatest – the finest, choicest, and best – in the world.
In Isaiah 28:16, God refers to a foundation stone as a “precious corner stone”, referring to Jesus. Ecclesiastes 7:1 says “(a) good name is better than precious ointment” or the most costly ointment, and Proverbs 3:15 says “wisdom is more precious than rubies”. In Psalm 49, we find that the redemption of our souls is precious. Surely, precious things are of much more value than anything that can be attained in this world.
So, how humbling, yet uplifting it is when we read Psalm 139:17-18 and realize that God’s thoughts toward us are precious and innumerable. To imagine that the Lord of the universe, Creator of all, and Lord of all, has innumerable thoughts of us and that those thoughts are precious. That the thoughts of us bring a joy that cannot be described by mortal words or measured by human abilities. This tells me that our God thinks mighty highly of His people. We should never doubt the love God has for His people. It is precious. With love, Sister Jackie
Day of Small Things 