Nehemiah 7:31-35: in context

This is one of the least promising passages in the Bible to read devotionally. It is a register of numbers: the men of Michmas, a hundred twenty-two; the men of Bethel and Ai, a hundred twenty-three; the men of Nebo, fifty-two; and so on, town after town, a bare headcount. There is no story here at all. But it helps to know what is actually being counted.

These are the people who came back. After seventy years of exile, the Jews in Babylon were given permission to return to Judah and rebuild. But by then most of them had been born in Babylon; they had homes and businesses and settled lives there. Returning meant leaving all of that behind to travel to a ruined city and a broken-down homeland and start over from rubble. It was the hard, unglamorous, costly choice, and this list is a precise census of the ones who made it. And notice how small the numbers are, fifty-two from one town, a couple hundred from another. The return was a minority movement; most of the exiles stayed where it was comfortable. So this dry column of figures is really a roll of the willing, the specific, counted people who got up and went when most of their neighbors did not. And every little group is recorded separately, even the fifty-two, not lumped together or rounded off, each town's handful named and numbered.

There is something quietly moving in that once you see it. God keeps an exact count of the ones who answer a costly call, even when they are few, even the smallest groups. If there were a register today of the people who actually got up and did the hard, unglamorous, faithful thing when most stayed comfortable, would my name be in it, and does it change anything to know that God counts even the fifty-twos, precisely, one by one?