I recently became a new member in a special club. Everyone already in the club before me has bragged and bragged about how wonderful it is, and I’m finding out that they are, of course, absolutely right. It’s The Grandparents Club, and I’m now “Grandpa Kollmeyer” to my new-born grandson Philip. Amen! Hallelujah! Praise The Lord!
While awaiting Philip’s arrival and then celebrating his birth, our whole family has again been totally re-enthralled with the remarkable beauty and wonder of God’s ongoing work of creation, specifically with His creation of us humans. As I thought about the miracle of God creating Philip, and as I saw his perfect little body, I began to think about how intricate our bodies are and how only the hand of God the father, our creator, could accomplish such a phenomenal task.
How phenomenal is God’s creation of the human body? How phenomenal is Philip’s little body? And ours? Here are some mind-blowing facts about God’s highest creation, human beings. I found them on www.creationinstruction.org. They leave us with little more to say than, “Our God is an awesome God!”
Our human body has over 75 trillion cells. When God forms us in the womb He makes two sets of 23 chromosomes which come together with all the DNA information to make us a human being.
During our embryonic development, we don’t use our lungs to breathe, so God has designed a hole in the top chamber of our heart that has a flap to allow blood from our mother to bypass our lungs and go directly to our body. When we breathe our first breath, the pressure in our lung changes and the flap goes over the hole. That flap heals and seals in a matter of a couple of days, leaving the blood to now go to our lungs for the rest of our life.
There is an estimated one oct-tillion (1 and 27 zeroes) atoms in the average human body. To put that into perspective, if you covered the earth with peas four feet deep and then did that to 250,000 other planets of the same size, you would reach one oct-trillion.
The average human body has 10 gallons of water, enough carbon to make 9,000 pencils, enough phosphorous to make 2,200 matches, enough iron to make a medium nail, enough potassium to shoot off a small cannon, enough lime to white-wash a chicken coop and enough sulfur to rid one dog of fleas.
The average person will blink 330 million times in a lifetime, make 25 million finger clenches, 2.5 billion heartbeats, pump 350 million quarts of blood, take 740 million breaths, laugh 540,000 times and cry 3,000 times. The kidneys filter 40 gallons of blood a day. We will grow 60 feet of fingernails, 350 miles of hair and have 45 miles of nerves that send impulses at over 325 mph. There are 8 million red blood cells produced every second. We will take 1 billion steps covering about 77,000 miles with each step landing on the bones of our feet with a force three times our body weight.
We will breathe in about 78 million gallons of air, which is enough to fill the Hindenburg one and a half times. We have 20 feet of small intestine, which is five times the area of the body’s skin. The villa in the small intestine increases the surface area 600 times so that without it, the small intestine would need to be two miles long instead of its 20 feet. The intestines will process out over 4 tons of food in 70 years.
Our human brain weighs about three pounds and produces enough energy for a 20-watt light bulb. It holds enough information for 500,000 sets of encyclopedias, which, if stacked, would be 442 miles high.
We have about 2,100 gallons of blood pumped over 62,000 miles of blood vessels each day. We have about 125,000 hairs in our scalp with a loss of about 45 per day. Each follicle will grow about 30 feet in a lifetime. Blood can reach any part of our body in six seconds. Our fingertips are so sensitive that we can feel four-one hundred thousandths of an inch depression. Our eyes can see a candle lit 30 miles away on a clear evening. We can taste 4/100 gram of salt in 530 quarts of water. Our eyes can see 300,000 color variations. Every one of us has a unique and special voice print, finger print, iris print and body odor.
Amazing, isn’t it? I’m one who believes that Christians and scientists don’t have to be at contentious odds. I believe we can take scientific learning and discoveries and affirm that God is creator and master of all things, and we can marvel at all that He has made. And when I look down into the eyes of little Philip, I say, “Thank You, God! Thank You so much! You are awesome!”
Now excuse me, it’s my turn to change the diaper. Life is good today! Amen!
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[Kollmeyer is Pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Fayetteville.]
