October 10, 2013 (Thursday)
I have every reason to be thankful for a long life and good health. As the saying goes, “If I had known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
Been thinking about the human body and what a remarkable organism it is. Take teeth, for example. The Lord gave us teeth at a very early age, starting in infancy. As we grew, those “baby teeth” fell out and adult teeth took their place. That fact, all by itself, should make people sit up and think about evidence of design. A sixty-year old person has used his/her teeth for chewing about 33,000,000 times. At my age, the figure grows to 44,000,000. And that does not include all the chewing we do in addition to the three meals a day. Do you know of any piece of mechanical equipment that is heavily used and lasts so long?
And what about the heart? Beating 72 times per minute, it adds up to 4,320 beats per hour, 103,680 per day, 725,760 per week, and about 265,000,000 times per year. If you live to age 70, your heart, at the rate just described, will have pumped life-giving blood nearly 20 billion times. What a magnificently designed organ.
And breathing? Totally necessary to sustain your life, your breathing takes place whether you think about it or not. We breathe an average of 600 million times during a 70-year span.
After all that chewing, pumping and breathing, do you feel tired? Most of us probably never have thought about it much. Thinking about such things makes us want to pray like the Psalmist: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139:14 NIV).