You Are the Cause of God's Rejoicing

The Lord your God is with you,

he is mighty to save.

He will take great delight in you,

he will quiet you with his love

he will rejoice over you with singing. —Zeph. 3:17

In the universe are more than
four times forty billion galaxies,
each having on the order of
a hundred billion stars, and no one
knows how many other worlds there are,
and the one God in whom
all is contained created all that
is, from nothing, fifteen billion years ago.
Imagine for a moment all the
energy and matter that emerged
at that amazing singularity; and
ponder: God delights in me, and
with his love he quiets me.
For if there were not another person
anywhere, God would have made the
universe for you alone—created stars
and planets, elements and atoms,
corn and wheat and cottonwoods
in yellow-green profusion drinking from the
shallow streams meandering across the plains.

How can we take it in and make it
personal, this love that soars above a
trillion trillion light years? You can never be
anonymous, or lost among the
spinning suns and streaking comets;
you are the cause of God’s rejoicing.
He places you in paradise and blesses
you, requiring nothing but that you
accept his grace.