“Even all the hairs of your head are counted” (Mt 10:30).

The above verse about the divine follicle census appeared in Sunday’s Gospel. It shows up in the middle of a larger passage about proper perspectives on fear. Human beings are often afraid and, in many cases, they should be. But fear can be a paralyzing phenomenon, which is why the Gospels also often tell us, “Be not afraid!” In Sunday’s Gospel, fear is put in perspective. Man is mortal. But this life is not all there is. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.”

This Gospel is not just about fear. It is about another contemporary dilemma: a human lack of self-worth. In many ways, it is a more pronounced phenomenon these days, but it is hardly limited to our times. The devil stokes it. But it is not just supernatural forces that drive this self-deprecation.  There are powerful currents of modern thinking that likewise downgrade man. He’s just an evolved ape. He’s an accident of biogenesis. He’s an invasive species on a minor rock around a peripheral, third rate star. He’s a carbon footprint degrading a world that would be better off without his exploitive presence.

We can put a lot of names, well- and less-known, to those ideas: Darwin, Hawkins, Singer, Benatar, Marx, et al. I would not deny infernal inspirations to bad thinkers. Anything degrading that nasty concoction called man, with one foot in the spiritual world, another in the material, furthers the rebellion of evil.

But I cite the truth — “even all the hairs of your head are counted” — because of my experience.

I remember once reading that passage while sitting on an airplane. A height of 30,000 feet offers distinct perspectives. We were passing over millions of people below. In the space of eight hours, we will have flown over millions of people I never knew. And it was night. Above were the stars. In the configuration of billions and billions of stars across uncounted galaxies and countless ages, what did this flying aluminum tube with 300 or so souls aboard matter?

And yet God bothers with me? Not just with me, but with the stupid hair count on my head? Well, I could at least be consoled that I have been troubling him less over the years, as the count has decreased. But that’s not completely true, either: Unlike my paternal grandfather, who was bald, I took after my maternal grandfather (whom I never met) with a fair amount of white hair.

In the perspective of galaxies, nations, peoples, and eras, a hair strand or a sparrow doesn’t seem to matter much. To the Darwins, Marxes, and Singers, it does not. Nor to most people, for whom the vast majority of us will never be more known than a gravestone whose name and dates even over time weather away.

So it is a question of faith. Do you believe that you are wanted? Do you believe that your existence is intended and not just the result of fast sperm on the right day of the month when your father was interested and your mother had no headache? That you are not just a couple gallons of water and $2.98 worth of chemicals flying through life for a short span of time, perhaps momentarily in an aerial aluminum tube? Do you believe that, even if anything happened to you in that aluminum tube, it was not just a freak of fate? That the number of hairs on your head even matter to Someone?