How Precious Also Are Your Thoughts to Me, O God

     As I lay down a few nights ago, I was bombarded by thoughts from 1,000 directions.  And if I choose to answer a few in one direction, it felt like I was dropping something in the other directions.
     As I was lying there, I was listening to a new jazz CD I had really been enjoying, Gary Burton's Cool Nights, and I was just lying there letting the music kind of wash over me.  And all of a sudden I started meditating on Psalm 139 and seeing it in a new light.  It says, "How precious also are Your thoughts to me [or toward me], O God!  How great is the sum of them!  If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand;  When I awake I am still with You" (Psalm 139:17-18).
     As I lay there, and the music was just kind of washing over me, I imagined I felt God's continual thoughts--toward me, to me--washing over me in the same way and lifting me just like the music, even as I lay there to go to sleep.  I love how the psalmist talks about the immensity of God's thoughts toward him while he is sleeping, and how when he wakes up he finds God still present with him.  It is as if he can put his own thoughts to rest and sleep soundly, because he knows he is surrounded by God's thoughts toward him.
     Even though our thoughts are small, God has put great thought into us.  "For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb.  I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works..." (vv. 13-14).
     And even when we have lost the ability to understand our lives, the psalmist takes comfort in this: "O Lord, You have searched me and known me.  You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off.  You comprehend my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways...Where can I go from Your Spirit?...If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall fall on me,' even the night shall be light about me" (vv. 1-3, 7, 11).