There’s a joke I’ve heard a lot: “We come from dust and when we die, we go back to being dust. That’s why I don’t dust. It could be someone I know.”

There are a few places in the Bible that talk about our dusty origin story—one being Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Starting from the “dust of the ground” is about as low as you can get!

Here’s another one from Psalm 103:13-14. It says, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” First of all, God knows how we’re formed—that we’re just a pile of dust. Trying to impress God, like we try to impress the people we run into every day, seems like a big, fat waste of time. There’s nothing we can say or do to surprise or wow Him.

But this verse isn’t meant to make us feel worthless. In the preceding verses, it says: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”

He loves us that much even though He knows everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—about us…where we come from, what we’re thinking, our motivations, all of it. The New Living Translation says, “For he knows how weak we are.” Unless you’re prepping for a job interview, nobody likes to spend much time thinking about our weaknesses, but we want His compassion and we need His intervention on our behalf because we are ultimately so very weak.

Thinking about how God, our Father, has compassion on us makes me think about when my kids were very little. I remember bringing my newborn daughters home from the hospital. They were so little and fragile, and they relied on us to meet all their needs. When they had a dirty diaper or spit up on me, I didn’t just say “Gross, Ella” or “Lucy, you disgust me!” I didn’t shout at them, “Clean yourselves up, girls!” No! I knew them, how they were formed, where they came from, what their weaknesses were. And I had compassion on them. Not because they had something significant to offer me or because I was an exceptional person, but because I was their mom.

This verse also feels a little like it might work in reverse. Like in Matthew 6 when Jesus says, “If you forgive others for the wrongs they do to you, then your Father in heaven will also forgive your wrongs. But if you don’t forgive others, then your Father in heaven won’t forgive the wrongs you do.” So here when it says, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him,” I wonder if the reverse would be true? Like maybe the person who lacks tenderness and compassion towards others won’t be shown compassion by the Lord. That’s a frightening thought!

Being a parent can often be an inward battle to die to ourselves and to lavish undeserved grace and mercy on our kids. (Which is exactly what God does for us!) Those of us who get to be parents—or those who are around kids we love as if they’re our own—are given a fitting example of how God loves us, and how we’re called to love. God has compassion on us, so he instructs and disciplines us. Out of His great compassion, He comforts us, picks us up when we fall, and He forgives us. A pile of dust couldn’t ask for a better Father!