Russian author Leo Tolstoy grew up in a fairly wealthy family with lots of servants, serfs as it were, who catered to the Tolstoy’s every need and whim. Then, one day, for business reasons, the family moved temporarily to Moscow.
Young Leo Tolstoy was eight years old at the time. And when they got to the big city, the boy experienced a shock. From his earliest memories, everything had seemed focused on him and his family. Everything! That’s not hard to understand; not really. I mean, if your family owned hundreds of serfs, slaves basically, you’d probably get the idea that everything revolved around you too, especially if you were a child. Suddenly, however, the boy discovered that the world, which he thought had centered around the Tolstoys—really didn’t. It was a rude awakening.
“For the first time,” he wrote, “it became clear to me that we (our family) were not the only people on earth, that all the world’s interests did not converge upon us and that there was another life, that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing about us and did not even know that we existed.”
That easy to think, isn’t it? However, Scripture paints another picture. It paints a picture of world in which God cares about each one of us, even to the point where Jesus says: “Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will.” (Matthew 10:29).
Or, as Ellen White writes: “The relations between God and each soul are as distinct and full as though there were not another soul upon the earth to share His watchcare, not another soul for whom He gave His beloved Son. {SC 100}
May we, each one of us, individually, live in the peace of this wonderful knowledge.
