WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?

When I consider the heavens . . .

As a boy growing up in rural Frederick County, Maryland, I remember being outside lying on the flat of my back on a warm summer's night and gazing up at the vast canopy of stars and galaxies overhead. It was peaceful and quiet there in the farmland of Middletown Valley that was my home, and the view of the heavens was unobstructed and breathtakingly beautiful. "Who is God," I wondered to myself, "that He could create all of this and still know me as an individual person?"

I didn't yet know very much about Heavenly Father or His beloved Son, Jesus Christ; but I had a sincere desire to believe that there was someone greater than me who knew that I existed and even cared about what I thought and worried about in my own little world. It would be sometime later when I discovered the words of David in the Old Testament of the Bible:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: (Psalms 8:3-6)

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church, captures the feeling that I first experienced when I gaze into the heavens as a youth: "The universe is so large, mysterious, and glorious that it is incomprehensible to the human mind. The wonders of the night sky are a beautiful testimony of that truth. There are few things that have filled me with such breathless awe as flying in the black of night across oceans and continents and looking out my cockpit window upon the infinite glory of millions of stars. Astronomers have attempted to count the number of stars in the universe. One group of scientists estimates that the number of stars within range of our telescopes is 10 times greater than all the grains of sand on the world’s beaches and deserts."

Given those kinds of numbers and knowing that God has created all of this, it would be easy for each of us to rationalize that we are pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. But then, again, Heavenly Father doesn't look at things the same way that we do with our finite minds. He has a very different way than that of the world to weigh the true worth of a soul. 

President Uchtdorf tells us that God Himself had declared that we are the reason He created the universe! His work and glory—the purpose for this magnificent universe—is to save and exalt mankind. In other words, the vast expanse of eternity, the glories and mysteries of infinite space and time are all built for the benefit of ordinary mortals like you and me. Our Heavenly Father created the universe that we might reach our potential as His sons and daughters.

And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine. And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words. For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. (Moses 1:37-39)

So being highly esteemed by Our Creator and having been made in His image and likeness, we must begin to realize the great potential that lies within each of us even the very least of us (as we might be viewed by the world).  Compared to God, we perceive that man is nothing; yet we are everything to God. While I may have viewed myself during my boyhood as being insignificant against the backdrop of those infinite number of stars in the sky, I now understand that God knows me and all of His children by name and desires to help each of us to fulfill the purpose for which He created us.