Imagine if someone could get every person on earth to combine his or her efforts to do something spectacular together.  There are 6 billion of us on this planet.  Imagine what we could do if every single one of us dedicated our entire lives towards one common purpose.  Now imagine if you had ten thousand worlds like ours, and every person on every planet decided to join this singular purpose.

Try to imagine the scope of a mission like that.  It seems impossible to imagine trillions of individuals all acting for the good of some other thing, but this is very similar to what is constantly happening in our own bodies.

In your body right now, there are about 50 to 100 TRILLION cells that are working to keep you alive.  In his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, William Bryson compares the cells in our body to a country of trillions of citizens who are:

“…each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes—all those things you learned about in junior high school biology—but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defense the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you—billions of them do so daily.”

Right now those trillions of citizens are extremely busy.  Whether you’ve realized it or not, they have been enabling your brain to engage in the billions of calculations that it takes to stay alive and read a book.  All of these words that you quickly scan through represent countless neurons that are firing and processing and calculating.  As you read this,  your eyes are taking in about ten one million point images every second.  That’s a lot of information to handle, but you don’t need to worry about it because your cells have got you covered without you even having to think about it.

Right now, your body is recreating itself.  You get an entirely new set of skin every month.  You get an entirely new skeleton every three months.

Your brain has an entire pharmacy in it and is producing the chemicals that you need to go on.  Your heart is pumping the nutrients and oxygen that you need to every part of your body.  It takes a lot of pumping to do that.  About 75 gallons of blood an hour.  That is about 1800 gallons a day or 657 thousand gallons a year.

That blood is being pumped through a complex network of arteries, veins, and blood vessels.  If you took all of blood vessels in your body and stretched them from end to end, they would be long enough to wrap around the earth about three times.

In your body.

In a moment, do yourself a favor and take a good look at your hands.  Wiggle your fingers.  Look at the skin that covers the intricate system of bone, muscles, tendons, and blood vessels.   On just one square inch of that skin, you have about 4 yards of nerve fibers, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels.

Look at the artwork on your fingertips.  That is the only one like it in the history of the world.  Even though, that skin has been shed and re-grown countless times, it keeps coming back, and it keeps coming back as you.

There are trillions and trillions of atoms that make up your body, but you aren’t just atoms because those atoms change all of the time.  The building blocks that make you up keep changing, but they continually keep building that one specific, unique thing that has never existed in the history of the universe until you were born.

And so we like the Psalmist say, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”