In Heaven There Are No Statistics

Joseph Stalin is said to have said, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Of course, as one who racked up dozens if not hundreds of "statistics" under his command, Stalin had a vested interest in believing in this philosophy. But this is not how God works. Whether our Heavenly Father has lost one out of two, one out of ten, or one out of one hundred, the losses are all equally tragic in His eye, because in each case, the worth of one soul is great in the eyes of God. In Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times, the young schoolgirl Sissy Jupe shows that she struggles with statistics just as much as our Heavenly Father does. When her teacher lays out a statistics scenario for her, "In a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage?" Sissy Jupe gives as her reply, "Nothing. Nothing... to the friends and relations of the people who were killed." It is easy to lose sight of our purpose, to feel abandoned and forgotten, to conclude that we are mere afterthoughts and unimportant in Heaven's grand schemes. But our thoughts are not God's thoughts. We may have lost sight of our Savior, but He will never lose sight of us. He has graven us upon the palms of His hands. He cannot forget us, just as He cannot forget the pain and the labor and the anguish and the struggle He endured to save and rescue us. We are not decimal points or percentages or statistics to Him. A million lost souls is not a statistic to our Savior. It is a million separate tragedies, each uniquely and deeply painful. Christ would rather and in fact did suffer an infinite amount to avoid the infinite separate tragedies that He and His Father would have endured if none of us made it back home. When Peter asked Jesus if seven times was enough times to forgive, Jesus essentially said, forget about the numbers. It has never been about the numbers. The only number that has ever mattered is One. One Father looking out for one child. One Savior saving one sinner. One by one. That we may all be one in Christ, even as He and His Father are One. God will not accept fifty percent losses, or ten percent losses or one percent losses. When Jesus said there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents, than over the ninety and nine who need no repentance, it is because, first of all there don't exist 99 souls that don't need repentance. There was only ever One who didn't need repentance. But second of all, it is because God doesn't see a single, homogenous group of ninety nine, He sees ninety nine separate Ones, and He knows in His bones exactly what it cost to get each single one back home, and His joy is great over each and every one that comes back home.