How does God see us?

To a company, you and I are but some persons who, once sacked or resigned, are easily replaced by some other persons.

To a hawker, you and I are but patronizers who come and go. If we return again, it is good income for him but if we do not, then someone else will come by to patronize.

To a maid, you and I may be family for a time but once our paths are separated, another family will come by to hire and share their lives.

To a doctor, you and I are patients who are cared for during the moment of consultation and treatment. Shortly after, another patient enters the clinic while we would have collected our medicine and left.

If we look around our society today, things and people are easily replaced. If our newly purchased camera is faulty, we take it to the shop and they will make a 1-for-1 exchange. If you do not know what to do with your old Tefal iron, you can trade it in and buy another at a lower purchase price. If your pen ran out of ink today, wouldn't you simply go to the book store to get a refill ink or buy another pen? Like things, we come and go just like everyone else. In a moment, the paths of life meet and then they separate again. To many, you and I are just passing by, for that few seconds of brushing past each other as we cross the road, that few minutes of squeezing next to each other on a jam-packed train. To many, you and I really do not matter... in our absence, someone else will replace us.

Yet, if we look again at our lives, there are things that are just one of a kind. If someone designed and handmade a single piece of flower vase as a gift to us, we know that once this vase is broken, we can never find a duplicate to replace it. We could try to describe or show a picture of the vase to another skilled potter but he will never be able to replicate an exact same vase as the broken one. If someone special gives us a gift and this someone has since passed away, we know it that even if we were to buy the same item from the mall, it will still not be the same for it will be without that attachment of sentiments left by the deceased.

And so it is too, to a family member, you and I may form a large part of his life, the meaning of his daily struggles, the warmth he returns to at the end of a day. Without you and I, life to this person will never be the same again. Another mother, father, brother or sister will never be able to replace the person we are and the presence we claim in our families.

To a close friend, you and I may form the pillar of strength he relies upon when life seems to turn on him, the listening ear he lends when no one else seem to care. Without you and I, life to this person will never be the same again. Another close friend will never be able to exactly replace the kind of person we are to this friend.

Most of all, whether we are some unknown person hiding in a cave, an average citizen like most of us are, known to a group of people we come into contact with or we are a high profile successful person of society whose face is publicised on the magazine's cover page, we are far more than that one person in billions of people who have lived, who is living and who will live on this planet Earth... because we are, to God, irreplaceable.

Each of us is loved by Him with the most tender and personal love. He loves you and I for who we are and not for what we can do and certainly not for what we have achieved in life. He loves us; our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and failures. He sees what we are, what we are not, what we struggle to be, and what we can become... and seeing all that He sees in us, He loves us.

Though it may seem like we are just passing through life on earth, a person who was born and who will one day go and thereafter, be forgotten in man's hearts, to God, He knows who we are, each individual human person, and He watches over us day after day, He sees all that we do, and He is loving us in every moment, even when we are in sin. And it is precisely when we are in sin that God yearns even more for us because He cannot bear the separation that we force upon Him when we choose to go away from Him in sin.

Such is the love of God for us and such is the significance we have in His heart, He who is our Creator. That when we think we do not matter to anyone at all, we actually matter the most in His heart. That when we think we are good-for-nothings, we actually are, in God's forming us in His own image and likeness, the evidence of His love for us because He wants to share something in common with us, He wants to associate Himself with us. That when we think we are the most undeserving of anything, God extends His hands to us and affirms us that however we may think and feel, He has already poured out His love for us on the cross and there is no way He can retract that love, already given, willingly, to you and I. That when we shy away from Him when we realise how evil our hearts may be, He opens His arms and says to us, "Come, ... come to Me."

How can we ignore such a God?
How can we go on living in our sinful ways in the presence of such a God?
How can we remain in despair at life's troubles when we have such a God?
How can we despise ourselves and think that we are less important than who we are to such a God?

How is such a God, this one and only God, calling us and inviting us today to open our hearts to accept and reject no longer, to receive and ignore no longer, His love for us? How do we see ourselves? And how differently does God see us?

8 September 2011, Thursday
10.19pm