As an introvert, I usually get home from work with a desire to hide from the world for a while. I’ve dealt with people all day long, and I’ve had enough. There are even times while still at work when I start to get frustrated with all of the meetings and coffees and casual conversations in the hall and people leaning in to my office to find out if I “have a minute.” (Note that a minute is always at least a quarter hour long.) After all, I have important paperwork to do. Right now, I need to finish drafting the Fall 2018 class schedule, write a description of a proposed program, review and edit the slides for an upcoming advisory board meeting, gather and report a bunch of statistics on our various programs, write up reports from about six recent classroom observations, and several other things that are not immediately coming to mind. And that excludes several email responses I owe people.

All of that is important. It’s all stuff that actually affects people, both students and faculty. And I’m going to shut my door for a portion of the day tomorrow to get some of the most urgent part of it done. But the reality is that when I start resenting the people who are getting in the way of my finishing the paperwork, I’ve lost sight of what’s important. Because God is not about the paperwork. God is about the people.

How do I know that? Well, there are a lot of clues in the Bible, but the most recent sign of it I ran across was in reading Romans 16. That’s the last chapter of the letter, and the end is a beautiful doxology, but the first 15 verses are a bit slow-going: somewhat reminiscent of various passages in the first five books of the Bible such as the genealogies.

In these verses, Paul is talking about a bunch of people. First, he tells the Romans a bit about the person carrying the letter, and then he greets a lot of different people by name. Some of those people are kind of familiar to us from other parts of the New Testament. Prisca and Aquila are the Priscilla and Aquila with whom Paul stayed in Acts. Rufus may be the same as the Rufus mentioned in Mark 15:21, a son of Simon of Cyrene who helped carry the cross. But most of these names are not familiar to us; many don’t appear anywhere else in the Bible.

So what’s the point of having all of these names listed? For that matter, what’s the point of all of those long lists of names in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? Why should we take the time to read them? Why are they part of the inspired word of God?

While I am sure there are reasons I don’t understand yet, I would offer this one: they demonstrate to us that God cares about the people. Every one of those names represents someone who matters to God as an individual. If we can take nothing else from such passages, we can take comfort from knowing that the God who cared enough to have that person listed for posterity cares just as much about us as about the people whose names appear in the Bible.

And, I think, we should take those lists as a reminder that the people matter. Yes, it is important that I get the Fall 18 schedule drafted by the deadline and that I do a good job of it. That will impact 800 or so people next fall. But I can’t forget that it is also important that I take the time required to stop and listen to whatever individual is asking for my attention, because that person is important to God and must, therefore, matter greatly to me.