Maybe God doesn't hear you.

The world is pretty big. There are a lot of countries, with millions and millions of square miles of people and land and ocean. The universe is even bigger than that. I’ve never been but from the photos I’ve seen it’s massive. Pathways of stars, belts of black holes and galaxies and planets. It’s just endless, and somewhere up there, God knows your boyfriend broke up with you.

Maybe he doesn’t. I mean, maybe he’s up there and he’s working on really big stuff. He’s healing famines and trying to bring peace to war torn lands. The greatness of his issues makes your little issues look ordinary and simple and maybe even boring.

But it’s getting harder and harder for me to think that. Every now and then I come across a verse that shakes my deep belief that I am beneath God’s radar. One that I found recently was Psalm 56:8. Here, in what hopefully makes me look pretty smart, is the King James Version:

“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?”

I admit, that’s not the clearest word in the world, so here’s what the New Living Translation says:

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”

I think that’s beautiful. Can you imagine that? Can you picture God doing that? Taking his giant hands and tenderly picking up every single one of your tears? Knowing why it came, understanding what it means, placing it in his bottle. Waking up in the middle of the night to look at it. Standing there in his big God kitchen with the night dark and the windowsill empty except for your tears. A hand holding that bottle and wishing it was you instead that he was comforting.

That’s how God spends his days.

That’s how small this big universe is.