"I'm in love! I'm in love! And I don't care who knows it!"

I went on a walk with Jesus this evening.  Which turned into a run with Jesus, because I wanted to catch a perfect view of the sunset.  Which turned into a dance with Jesus, because there was this field that just begged dancing in, and because He invited me.

If you don't believe the title of this post, ask all the people who, if they looked out the back windows of their houses, saw me spinning in circles in said field until I staggered and fell over like a crazy drunk person.

Sorry.  I'm getting sidetracked and starting to ramble.  But I've learned from observation that those are usually side effects of being in love. :-)

Anyway.  While I was in the field, He told me to look at the flowers.  So I bent over and examined a simple yellow flower, which some would call a weed, that grew all over the field.  As I studied it, I began to see the intricate details that I wouldn't ordinarily notice.  I marveled at it and thought, He, the God of the universe, made every detail of this!

Then He told me to look up at the clouds.  The whole sky was filled with them.  Gray, white, pink; puffy, flat, hazy--every shape, size and color strewn across the sky like so many strokes of a giant paintbrush.  And I thought, He made all of those, too!

He pulled my attention back to the ground.  This time, I gazed at a stalk covered in blue flowers and noticed a group of the tiniest ants traversing the stem of the plant.  And He struck me with the contrast of His creation.  From the ground, I picked the smallest blade of grass I could find.  Then I closed one eye and held the blade of grass between my open eye and a massive collection of clouds.

They were the same size.

I twirled the grass between my fingers as I pondered that reality.  As I did, it broke in two.  I stared at the two pieces, and a strange thought struck me: He knows.  He knows that blade of grass just broke in my hand.  He made those majestic clouds, and yet He knows that the tiniest piece of grass has broken in two.

I took a picture of the grass and the clouds, because I wanted to remember what He was showing me.

See, I think God sees this world much the same way that I saw it when I held the grass in front of my face and looked at it and the clouds:  It's all the same size.  I don't think He looks at the clouds as big and important, while seeing the grass as small and insignificant.  I think He spent just as much time making the grass as He did making the clouds, and I think He takes equal joy in both.  I think He pays just as much attention to those ants as He does to the elephants.  I think He looks down at His creation and every piece bears equal weight in His eyes, because when He made it all at the beginning of time, He said the same thing about every bit of it: He called it good (Genesis 1).

So where does that put us, as people?

At the Little Light House, the wonderful place where I work, we've been teaching the kids about the Sermon on the Mount.  As Jesus speaks to the people, He begins to talk to them about the birds and the flowers and points out how God takes care of them.  Then He says, "Are you not much more valuable than they?" (Matthew 6:26)

He created the grass of the field and the clouds of the sky and called them both equally beautiful in their own ways.  And then He looked at us--broken, fallen, sinful--and said, "You are much more valuable than all the rest."

And to prove it, He came down here, died on a tree, and came back to life again so that He could spend forever with us.

Seriously: How can you not love a Man like that??? ;-)