In one of my favourite Psalms, David says this to God:
"You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous — how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed." [Psalms 139:13-16. NLT]
A friend of mine sent me these interesting facts about the human body …
1. The average red blood cell lives for 120 days.
2. There are 2.5 trillion (give or take) of red blood cells in your body at any moment. To maintain this number, about two and a half million new ones need to be produced every second by your bone marrow. That's like a new population of the city of Toronto every second.
3. Considering all the tissues and cells in your body, 25 million new cells are being produced each second. That's a little more than the population of Australia – every second !
4. A red blood cell can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds.
5. Nerve Impulses travel at over 400 km/hr (25 miles/hr).
6. A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 miles/hr), and a cough moves out at 100 km/hr (60 miles/hr).
7. Our heart beats around 100,00 times every day.
8. Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey.
9. Our eyes can distinguish up to one million colour surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man.
10. Our lungs inhale over two million litres of air every day, without even thinking.
11. We give birth to 100 billion red cells every day.
12. When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 mph.
13. We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile.
14. We are about 70 percent water.
15. We make one litre of saliva a day.
16. Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.
17. In one square inch of our hand we have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors.
18. We have copper, zinc, cobalt, calcium, manganese, phosphates, nickel and silicon in our bodies.
19. It is believed that the main purpose of eyebrows is to keep sweat out of the eyes.
20. A person can expect to breathe in about 40 pounds of dust over his/her lifetime.
21. There are more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth.
22. From the age of thirty, humans gradually begin to shrink in size.
23. Your body contains enough iron to make a spike strong enough to hold your weight.
24. The surface area of a human lung is equal to that of a tennis court.
25. Most people have lost fifty per cent of their taste buds by the time they reach the age of sixty.
26. The amount of carbon in the human body is enough to fill about 9,000 'lead' pencils.
27. One square inch of human skin contains 625 sweat glands.
28. When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
29. The human body has less muscles in it than a caterpillar.
30. If you could save all the times your eyes blink in one life time and use them all at once you would see blackness for 1.2 years!
31. The life span of a taste bud is ten days.
32. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
33. Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze. You're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body.
34. The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose.
35. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
36. Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute.
37. The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime – that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.
38. Babies start dreaming even before they're born.
39. The human body can function without a brain.
40. Humans are the only primates that don't have pigment in the palms of their hands.
41. 10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria.
More tomorrow …
It’s going to drop to a chilling 26 degrees today in Brisbane. At least you lucky Melbournites get to enjoy a proper winter!
Back to the topic at hand…if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff I highly recommend a fantastic book written by Dr Paul Brand and co-authored by Philip Yancey a few years ago.
In the Likeness of God: The Dr. Paul Brand Tribute Edition of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and in His Image
Dr Paul Brand was an English orthopedic surgeon who spent most of his life working with leprosy patients in India as a missionary doctor. He developed tendon transfer techniques for use in the hands and pioneered microsurgery that has revolutionised the treatment of the disease in the 21st century. Paul Brand was to Hansen’s disease (leprosy) what Bill Gates was to computers.
What makes this a unique read, is that it was not written by a pastor, but a Christian doctor who over the years through his profession came to see the strong parallels between the human body and the body of Christ, the church. This is not your usual clumsy allegorising of Scripture where you ‘spiritualise’ and read into it all your biases, but an authentic comparison of the bodily functions with spiritual realities. Strongly biblical, and layman-style scientific so everyone can understand.
WOW!!! God is just so incredibly amazing! Thanks for the post Mark 🙂
Thanks for the book recommendation John. Sounds very interesting.
Must get a copy and check it out.
God is awesome!! When we see the intricacy of the human body how can anyone say there is no Designer and we all just evolved out of mush?
There is always a designer for everything beautiful. Even if something could evolve, something must have designed the evolution laws!.
Nothing can come out of nothing.
This is so weird. The head of primary just shared that exact same thing, and I mean exact..scripture and facts….at morning assembly on Friday morning. Was this posted somewhere or something? Thanks for sharing as it was neat to read the facts again.
I meant to say “the head of primary at my kids’ school”.
Janelle, just goes to show you that it really is a small world after all and we are all connected in one way or another 🙂
Hello I enjoyed yoiur article. I think you have some good ideas and everytime i learn something new i dont think it will ever stop always new info , Thanks for all of your hard work!.
Thanks for this page. I made a link to it to drive my point.