Who Am I, Under All These Stars?

Have you ever stood outside at night,
when the dark is soft and the sky is wide,
and looked up?

Up past the roof. Up past the trees.
Up where the stars hang like a million tiny lamps,
scattered by a hand far bigger than yours.

Up where the moon rides high
over the deep, deep black between,
all of it set in place, just so.

And maybe, looking up,
you felt very small.
So small you wondered:

Does anyone even see me down here?
In all this bigness,
am I too little to matter?

David felt it too.

Long before he was ever a king,
he was a shepherd boy,
lying out in the fields at night
with the sheep breathing soft around him.
And he looked up at the very same stars
God had set burning in the dark
back in the first week of the world,
when he made everything and called it good.

Lord, David whispered,
when I look at the sky your fingers made,
the moon and the stars you set in place,
who am I?

Who is a small person like me,
that you would even think of us?
That you would remember our names?

The big God heard that small question,
and he answered it in a way
no one would have guessed.

He did not pass the tiny ones by.
He bent low. He came close.
He took the small, the forgotten, the easy-to-miss,
and he crowned them.

Crowned them like kings and queens,
with glory, with honor,
with his own gentle care.

He set his whole green world in their keeping.
The sheep and the birds, the fish that slip through the sea,
the wide and waving fields.

The God who hung the stars
leaned down to a little one and said,
You. You I will lift up high.

David sang it,
but he did not yet know
the end of his own song.
There was an ache in it,
a question still waiting for its answer.

Because someday,
the God who lifts the small ones
would become a small one himself.

The Maker of every star
folded himself down into a baby,
made a little lower than the angels,
born where the sheep were kept.

The Son of Man, they called him,
a man so lowly and so easy to overlook
that he had nowhere to lay his head.

And from that low, low place,
God lifted him highest of all.
Crowned him with the brightest glory.
Set him over the stars and the sea and everything that breathes.

So now, when you stand under all that sky
and feel too little to be seen,
remember:

The one who counts the stars
also counts you.
He knows your name. He knows your face.
He bent the whole sky low to come and find you.

You are not too small.
You were never too small.
You are loved as if you were his only one,
and so is everyone he is gathering home.

So tonight, if you slip outside,
find the very smallest star you can see
and let it wink at you.
The God who set it burning there
knows exactly where you are standing,
and he is glad, so glad, that you are his.