The Lord Keeps Up with Everybody

Have you ever read your Bible and not meaning to you start thinking of something else?    Well, not long ago I was reading through Nehemiah 6-8, and when I got to chapter 7 the writer started listing all the names of the children of Israel that came back to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity.  The chapter looks like this:

Who came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Raamiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvai, Nehum, Baanah. The number, I say, of the men of the people of Israel was this;
The children of Parosh, two thousand an hundred seventy and two.
The children of Shephatiah, three hundred seventy and two.
The children of Arah, six hundred fifty and two.
The children of Pahathmoab, of the children of Jeshua and Joab, two thousand and eight hundred and eighteen.
The children of Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and four.

This pattern went on for 73 verses.  Most of the names are hard to pronounce, they are not names that stand out as having done something significant, and to be brutally honest, I started getting bored as I read through the long list.  At the end of the devotion I paused to consider why the Lord saw fit to include these names and asked how these names were suppose to affect me in 2013.

Then I realized something- the Lord keeps up with everybody.  He knew exactly what families came back to Jerusalem.  He saw them, He kept track of them, and He knew where they were at all times.  More importantly, He counted each soul individually significant.

God keeps up with our lives as well.  He has numbered our days.  He has numbered the hairs on our head.  He has numbered our tears.  He has numbered our families.  He has a record of our names in the Lamb’s Book of Life.  To others your life may be boring and simply a name on a page, but to God you are special and important enough to list in His book.