Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Psalm 139)

You’re a marvel of creation: about 50,000 cells in your body will have died and been replaced by new cells in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.

DNA contains all the unique genetic information that makes you you. If all the DNA packed into every cell of your body were stretched out and laid end to end, it would reach to the moon and back 8,000 times.

The ovum that your father fertilized when you were created was formed inside of your mother when she was herself a foetus. That egg cell is the largest cell in the human body but it is still smaller than the size of the full-stop at the end of this sentence. 

And that spermatozoon that made it first to that egg cell was 1 in about 250 million - when you consider that your chances of winning the lottery jackpot are only 1 in 14 million, you can see you were literally a born winner.

Your fingerprints were fully formed three months after conception. Mathematicians say that two sets of identical fingerprints could theoretically be possible. The chances, apparently, (and these people probably need to get out more) are 1 in 1,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 - or one in a quindecillion.

There are about 70,000 human genes of which only 78, those found in the X and Y chromosomes, distinguish men from women. Apart from the obvious differences in reproductive organs, body shape, skeletal structure and muscle mass, male and female brains are wired differently (there are more connections between left and right in women and more between front and back in men) meaning we complement each other.

The active bacteria in your body collectively weigh about 2 kilos. Even after cleaning your teeth, there are more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the world. It sounds horrible but they are vital to your well-being, helping you break down food you would otherwise be unable to digest.

Your eyes can distinguish about 10 million different colours and shades, and if your eyes were a digital camera it would say ‘580 megapixels’ on the box.

80 of your 206 bones are located in your hands and feet. Your bones are constantly recycling, just like skin. In fact, your skeleton is entirely reconstituted every seven years.

Your heart pumps 7,200 litres of blood around your body every day into about 40 billion blood vessels. Laid end to end, they would stretch four times the circumference of the earth at the equator. Each one of your kidneys, about the size of a large egg, contains a million filters, sifting and purifying around 1.3 litres of blood every minute.

There are around 300 million alveoli inside your lungs and if they were spread out, they would cover an area about the size of a tennis court. The digestive juice in your stomach is potent enough to dissolve razor blades, which is why you get a brand-new stomach lining about twice a week.

The liver is the Swiss army knife of your internal organs. It stores iron, produces bile, filters and detoxifies poisons, makes blood, fights against germs, manufactures proteins, stores energy like a battery, helps with clotting and produces the cholesterol necessary to make the hormones oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone.

If you’re a woman, your ovaries contain up to half a million egg cells, yet only 0.08% will get the opportunity to form a new human being. If you’re a man, your body manufactures about 1,500 new sperm cells every second - enough to repopulate the entire planet - 8 billion people - in just 61 days. (Please don’t!)

You formed me in my mother’s womb.

I thank you, High God - you’re breathtaking!

Body and soul, I am marvellously made!

I worship in adoration - what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.

From Psalm 139 (The Message)