» Thinking of You

Visiting Cannon Beach, Oregon, last week with my family, I walked out onto the shore and my feet sank into the warm, white sand. Words from Psalm 139:17–18 came to mind:

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! 

How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,

They would outnumber the grains of sand…

Gazing from one end of the beach to the other, I tried to imagine the number of God’s thoughts. I stooped down for a closer look at the sand and noticed how tiny each grain was—there must have been thousands of them sifting through my fingers. Multiplied by billions and trillions, that number represented God’s thoughts, plus more! The whole idea was overwhelming. I marveled with the psalmist, “How precious to me are your thoughts.”

In his Application Commentary of the Old Testament, Jon Courson says of Psalm 139:18, “This verse is God’s postcard to us. On the front is a picture of an endless sandy beach. On the back, it reads: ‘Thinking of you.’”

Jeremiah describes the Lord’s thoughts this way:

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11).

Jeremiah penned these words in a letter to the Jews while they were captives in Babylon. Even as the Jews worshipped idols and sacrificed their children, God wanted them to know He was thinking of them and wanted to restore them. God didn’t say He would love them if they’d just shape up; He loved them all along. After seventy years of captivity, the Jews grew sick of their idols, and God restored them back to their land and to Himself.

What a blessing to know that our Heavenly Father so cares for us! No love here on earth can compare—whether from a parent, spouse, child, or friend. Whose thoughts are like His, surrounding us with peace and hope? His thoughts of us are precious, outnumbering the grains of sand.