Do you ever get overwhelmed by how many people there are in the world? You get on the bus and people are crammed three to a seat. You walk down the hall and all you can see are bodies moving like a massive wave. You drive on the highway and there is a constant flow of cars as far as the eye can see?

How does that make you feel? Sometimes I get overwhelmed by it and I just need to find the nearest hole and climb inside it for a while.

Other times I think, “Whoa. For every face I see, for every driver of every car, there is a story.” Then I realize that the portion of humanity I see is just one tiny speck. It is one small portion of the billions of people that move around the planet every day. That means that there are billions of stories being lived out every day.

And I don’t know most of them.

I got thinking about this because of today’s reading found in Genesis 10:15-32. It is a genealogy. It is a list of names of all the children that were born after Noah and his sons. It is a lot of people.

At first I had the same reaction I usually have with a massive group of people. “Wow, that’s a lot of people that I don’t know. I am overwhelmed. I need to hide.”

But then another thought came to me. God loves everyone of those people, and those people are alive because God spared Noah’s family from the flood. God is about life. God told Noah and his family to “be fruitful and multiply” and fill the ends of the earth. I guess they got busy!

So, the next time you feel overwhelmed by so many people, and feel small, remember this. God’s love is so big that God can know every person’s story–your story–and love it like it is the only story worth knowing. AND, God loves to have ALL the stories filling the earth with life.