Describing God’s care for us, Jesus claims that the hairs of our heads are numbered—a number that God knows. I used to wonder about how that worked—was there some sort of divine tally sheet for each of us, and what would be the point of keeping track? After all, that number is a moving target. Why would it matter?
Later I realized that Jesus was not speaking literally about an exact number of hairs, he was using this expression to make a point about God’s particular love for each one of us. Here is one more reminder that none of us is really alone, no matter how much we may feel that way—we are known and loved, each of us.
That’s an important reality to remember. There is a tendency among many Christians to imagine that all believers share the same experience of knowing God. “When were you saved?,” they would ask. That question used to really worry me because I didn’t know. Was being lost and then found the only way to believe? What did that say about my faith?
Not until I was in seminary did I discover that I wasn’t that unique. Once-born Christians, those whose spiritual story is one of continuity and not conversion are more common than I thought—it’s even biblical! Compare the experience of Jesus’ disciples and traveling companions, for example, growing gradually in faith and understanding with the story of St. Paul, miraculously blinded by the truth while persecuting the church, and you can see what I mean. Paul just wrote more than any of Jesus’ first followers, so he got the most attention. But that doesn’t mean he’s the only role model we have!
All this came to mind as we completed our summer project, preparing the plastic (substituting for earthen) vessels to represent each one of us. Christians of all types talk a lot these days about telling our stories. By that we mean that we need to learn to describe special moments of God’s presence and our own spiritual awakening. But to go back to Jesus’ words reminding us of God’s unique care for each of us, it may be that the important story isn’t the dramatic one of conversion or life-changing insight. Maybe the story we need to remember is the ongoing, daily, weekly, yearly one of faithful walking. Growth comes in quiet ways as we struggle with the relevancy of our faith in the changing circumstances of our lives. It’s not that God really cares about how many hairs our heads have, but that his love and grace are present for us in each changing season of life. Don’t worry—whatever the future holds, God is there. I hope that our plastic vessels have helped us each celebrate our own unique journey. It’s not drama that Jesus calls us to share, it’s a journey. Sometimes there may be miraculous details to celebrate. But far more often we just keep walking, learning to notice, growing in trust and hopefully in grace. Plastic vessels are a good representation of this—the ordinary, gradually changed into the holy.