WONDERFULLY MADE

Last Friday someone in the park where we live tried to drive inside his neighbor's house. Good thing there was a brick flower planter or he would have done it. People driving by saw the bricks lying there and clucked their tongues that someone must have had too much to drink. The bricks are still there this morning. Until someone picks them up and repairs the wall, they will not move. The wall will not repair itself.

A man came up for communion at Sunday's service wearing a leg brace. It was protecting a broken ankle bone as a result of a missed step. The difference between the brick wall and the man's leg was that the leg was healing itself. The moment he broke his leg, millions of osteoblasts, those pot-hole repair cells began attaching themselves to the fracture site to make new bone.

Those cells hadn't been waiting around for that break. Billions of them had already been diligently replacing old bone cells so that when we were young our body's bone structures were replaced every year. Now only about 18 percent of an older person's bones are replaced every year. This is done by the osteoclasts, the demolition cells at work inside us to clean out the old cells so the osteoblasts can replace it with new ones. The older we get, the less willing our bodies are to let our bone (or other) cells get replaced.

If I tried to repair that broken brick wall by removing a line of bricks in a horizontal row, the rest of the wall would collapse. But if I replaced a brick here and there, always keeping the wall basically intact, I'd eventually have a new wall. That's how our body fixes itself, depositing new fiber here and there until the bone is fixed. The Blasts and the Clasts work together, without our permission or participation. We don't have to call them to start working. They just show up.

My point? Our body is no accident. There are hundreds of types of cells inside our bodies that do their work to grow us, repair us and keep us alive and healthy. Some say the Bible conflicts with science. But it is never more true when it says, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139:14)

With so many advances in technology and science today, it's easy to dismiss the notion of a Creator God. We foolish people still think that, given enough time and trials, the body just sort of flops itself together in the right order so we can be born, grow and get healing when we are injured.

But our bodies are not an accident of nature. God put us together this way. To insist on believing our bodies all just "happen" takes far greater faith than to recognize that a Divine Creator is made us this way. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made is a fine little book by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancy. I recommend it.

Stay healthy, use your head and drive safely today!