Social Justice: Who's Important?

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful I know that full well.  My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.  Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.  How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them!  Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand—when I awake, I am still with you.”

Psalm 139: 13-18

Take a second to read what is written in the psalm at the beginning of this devotion.  Really read it.  Read it again.  Let the weight of this passage sink in.  Think about what this passage is really saying.

You were made by the hand of God.  The God who is surrounded and worshipped by the hosts of heaven, the God who is bigger than what we can even imagine, the God who has no beginning and no end, created you.  He created you specifically and personally.  More than that, He specifically and personally ordained, or planned, the days of your life.  He was thinking about what your daily life look like before you had ever lived a day.  He created this plan for your life because He wanted the best for your life.  Then, even when you chose to ignore Him, or disobey Him, or you stopped following His plan for you, He stayed with you.  He didn’t leave you.  He kept loving you and kept working to get you back on His beautiful plan for your life. 

What an incredible, beautiful, transforming truth from the Word of God!  This passage tells us that we matter.  We matter enough for God to make us.  We matter enough for God to plan the days of our lives.  We matter enough that God thinks about us all the time.  Look at verses 17 and 18 again.  God thinks about us so often that His thoughts towards us are more in number than the grains of sand on a beach. 

Now, let’s take this to the next step: God has created every person you will ever meet, He has made great plans for their lives, and He thinks about each one constantly.  And I mean every person.  You.  Your parents.  Your siblings.  The bullies at your school.  The homeless man who asks people for money at gas stations.  The drug addict living on the streets.  The women sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison.  People living in nations all around the world.  People who go to churches we have some disagreements with.  People who hurt our feelings.  People who are cruel to us for no reason.  Each one of these people was created by God.  God made plans for them. He loves them, stays with them, and keeps thinking about them, even if they don’t follow His plans.

This is the starting place of social justice.  People, all people, matter because they matter to God.  They are important to Him, so they should be important to us.  Pursuing justice does not have to be something for the politicians or famous leaders of the world.  Justice happens when we look at another person and decide to treat them like they are important—because they are!

So remind yourself, in your daily life, as you talk to friends, when you order food at a restaurant, when you walk by a homeless man on the side of the road, that person is important.  Even as you talk to them, or just walk by them, God is thinking about that person.  And you know what?  Most of these people probably don’t know how important they are.  They don’t know God is always thinking about them and caring for them.  Maybe justice starts when we start acting like every person we meet is important.  Maybe it’s as simple as telling people that God is thinking about them, that He thinks they are important.

So let us spread justice one conversation, one person at a time.  Let’s start today!