How precious to me are your thoughts!

On Saturday evening I went to West End Presbyterian Church to see an Indelible Grace concert. (If you're not familiar with them, they take old hymns and set them to newer musical arrangements.) But it was perhaps the opener, Richmond-area native Chris Lucas, whose music left the most memorable moment of the night. His first song was about how nothing ever "occurred" to God. Our omniscient and all-wise Father has never had a moment of ignorance, has never thought in his mind, Gee, I never thought of that before!

After a very taxing week of school--a large number of my biology students are non-native English speakers struggling to read simple sentences, and the rest lack much of anything in the way of motivation--I felt nearly swept away in a torrent of unwarranted, faithless anxieties. How will I make it another 178 school days? How will I help these teens to succeed? How can I get them engaged and interested? And on top of that, being down to a few hundred dollars and not getting paid until the month's end, Will I have enough to pay my hospital bill from last month and still have food and gas this month?

But Chris's song put some life back into my heart; nothing ever "occurred" to God--the God who keeps watch over me and who never slumbers nor sleeps (Psalm 121). That evening I read Psalm 139:17-18, and a passage of it finally clicked that I was always somewhat perplexed by:

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you.

Of all the thoughts and worries that race through my mind and upset it, they are worries that are the fruits of but my puny, finite understanding and experience. I worry because I can't see the future. But my Father sees and knows vastly more than I can comprehend or imagine, and it is he who watches over me to guard my steps and supply nourishment for all facets of my faith and life. There is no thought, no situation, no circumstance in my life that escapes the All-Knowing, whose thoughts toward me are as innumerable as the grains of the shore's sand. Even the fact that daily I awake and am still with him ought to give me rest and peace. After all, I spend six or seven hours every night completely void of any activity. During the night I neither provide for myself nor protect myself from illnesses and from Satan's attacks. Yet morning by morning I rise again, not because of my own agency or because my fretting achieved something fruitful, but because the Lord watched over me and kept me alive.

So with Hagar I can call upon Lahai-Roi* and say, "Truly here I have seen him who looks after me" (Genesis 16:13).
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*"The living one who sees me"