Dear Friend, Alone and Miserable

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Dear friend,

Your heart is broken.

You feel abandoned and weak, a shadow of your former lively self.

I have been praying for you. At church this weekend, we prayed Psalm 147, and these verses leaped out at me, sounding so applicable to you, my friend:

The Lord heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
He tells the number of the stars;

he calls each by name.

I guess I've never thought about every star having a name, but there we have it: "He tells the number of the stars; he calls each by name." So the stars have names. What's more, God calls them by their names, implying that the stars respond. The stars are in relationship with God. Not just cold, mechanical constellations that guide navigation, stars have a sort of life and dignity, simply because God makes them and calls to them.

Please join me at Praying with Grace for more.

As I repeated the Psalm response after the cantor, I wondered how calling stars by name and healing
hearts are related. Why do they appear side-by-side in praise of God's power?

Well, both of those tasks are enormous, far too big for any human person. We would never think of asking a mere mortal to call the stars by name! And yet, don't we often look to others to do that other God-thing, to mend our brokenness?