Some years ago, when I was struggling with grief from a loss in my life, I came across a book from J. Keith Miller in which he suggested we start each day by writing down everything we heard the Lord saying to us. In my pain, I picked up my journal and took up that practice. Every day—absolutely every day—I heard: “Your are precious, and I love you,” followed by a variety of encouraging words. That went on for some time until God’s comfort dissolved my grief and enabled me finally to see the blessing of my loss. Our passage today from Isaiah, from which those words come, had long been meaningful to me, but that experience made it precious.

While I have often read these saving words as being addressed to me personally, I know that, for Isaiah, they were addressed , not to an individual, but rather to the whole people of God. For Isaiah, of course, that meant the people of Israel. Today they speak to me of all the people of the earth, all “whom [God] created for [God’s] glory, whom [God] formed and made.” All God’s children, “[God’s] sons from far away and [God’s] daughters from the end of the earth,” those from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, are precious in his sight. As the children’s Sunday school song puts it: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

We are all loved unconditionally, without measure—every single one of us throughout all the world, precious to God, enfolded in God’s steadfast love, mercy and grace. Would that we could each know that in every fiber of our being, that we could believe it with all our heart and act out of that perfect security so that our every interaction with others, both near and far, would come from love, with love, and through love in recognition and appreciation of the preciousness of the other in God’s sight.