You Are Known

 Carl Sandburg, in his biography of Abraham Lincoln, described the young Lincoln in 1831. “Abraham Lincoln, 22 years old, floated down the Sangamon River, going to a new home, laughter and youth in his bones, in his heart a few pennies of dreams, in his head a rag bag of thoughts he could never expect to sell.”  Lincoln himself says he arrived in New Salem like a “piece of floating driftwood.” Six years later, he was a licensed lawyer and a member of the state legislature. He packed his bags and moved to Springfield, Illinois.  The rest, as they say, is history.

 When J.R.R. Tolkien started writing The Hobbit in 1930, primarily for his own entertainment.  It wasn’t until his Oxford friend, C. S. Lewis took an interest in it that he finished its first draft and lent it to an Oxford student who forwarded it to a publisher who gave it to his 10 year old son.  The boy liked it so much that the publisher gave Tolkien a contract and a deadline for publishing the book in 1936.   The Hobbit first appeared on September 21, 1937 with 1,500 copies. Again, the rest is history.

 Few of us will ever emerge from obscurity to be noted in history like Abraham Lincoln, or in literature and cinema like J.R.R. Tokien and his Hobbits.   Perhaps this is why we thrive on the fame and fortune of others. Hoping that by following them we too might be known. But, in the end, we are faced with our anonymity. We remain nameless faces in the crowd.

 It might also explain our attraction to social media. Our digital world seems to offer opportunity to be somebody, to be noticed, recognized and known. But we soon find that social media is a vast sea, and all our selfies and posts are but a drop in the endless ocean of information. 

 But each one of us is important. Every person can be known.  Is it not enough that our family and friends will take notice of us and value our existence?  And is it not more than enough that God sees us and knows. To Him fame and fortune mean nothing. He has declared that the “least of these” are of enormous importance to Him, that the hairs of our head are numbered (though these numbers are more for some than for others). He notes our rising up and our lying down. He knows when we sleep and when we wake. (Psalm 139).

 God could have chosen any time and any place to introduce His Son into the world. He could have been born in a palace, surrounded with royalty, the centerpiece of fame and fortune, destined for greatness in the public eye.  Instead, God chose Nazareth, a rough scrabble town off the beaten path.  I visited Nazareth a few years ago. Even today, it is not impressive.

 He chose an obscure and unknown girl betrothed to an uneducated carpenter. Jesus would spend his childhood as a refugee in Egypt and later grow up in Nazareth, unknown and unnoticed by the world.  Why did God choose this means to introduce His Son into the world?  Perhaps it was to underscore how important each of us is in His sight. No one is obscure to Him.  No one is anonymous.  He sees you and He knows you.