By Jon Keehn

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” –Luke 2:1 (ESV)

Is there a time that you can think of where you felt like you didn’t matter? A time where you felt like nothing more than a number? I know that this is something that we have all experienced in one form or another at some point in our lives. With Christmas only a couple of weeks away were are in the time of year where everyone is reading Christmas devotions and the account of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2 and I’m no different.

I’ve spent a good amount of time over the last 10 days thinking about the Christmas story and why we celebrate etc…and while doing that I was reading Luke chapter 2 and the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem and something stuck out to me. The very first verse of Luke 2 talks about why Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem. They were going because of a census. This got me thinking about censuses and the reasons for them, (I know, ADD much?) and I couldn’t help but see something there. There are many different reasons that governments take censuses but one of the most basic ones is to get a semi accurate count of how many people live in a given town, county, state, country, etc..

Unfortunately, in the eyes of our governments most of us are simply a number, and it’s in the middle of one of these censuses that the God of the Universe decided to step into human history and be counted among the rest of us as a simple number. Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us at his birth was written down as simply one more person that was a resident of Bethlehem. But when it comes to God, it’s not the same story. We aren’t simply numbers to Him. We have a name. We have a face. We have a story.

I used to be part of a church where every Sunday there would be someone standing in the back of the room and we would count how many people were there for worship. We always knew our monthly average of how many people had come through the doors, and now I can’t help but wonder if there were people that walked into our church as a visitor, as someone completely unknown to everyone else in the building and were never greeted or given the chance to be known by name.

Maybe you have been on a missions trip where at the end of the day you hear the tally of how many people were seen in your medical clinic, how many children showed up to the activity, or you see the photos where you are with a family, yet you don’t know the name of anyone in that picture or the name of anyone that those numbers represent…

You and I are known. Jesus himself knows us by name. This brings me more peace, more comfort, more worth than I could ever explain in words. At the same time I am challenged to slow down and spend more time with the “unknowns”, the “numbers” who I walk by everyday. Will you take the time this Christmas season to be a friend to one of those “numbers”?