The Human Body

In the Likeness of God is a compilation of two books written in collaboration by Phillip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand. I have reflected to an extent on how interesting our bodies are, but Dr. Brand spent many years as a surgeon treating leprosy. His thoughts on the amazing systems that have to work for our bodies to function normally have kept me up too late at night, often reading for hours after I should be asleep.

The reminder that our bodies are collections of individual units of cells that have become so uniquely specialized and cooperative that I can sit here, recalling information I read when light bounced off of a page, registered on thousands, millions of cells in my eye designed only to send out an electrical signal when light or perhaps only a specific wavelength of light strikes them, my brain - a collection of further individual cells - interpreted the electrical signals from my eyes and turned that into information to be stored away, which I now recall and send to my hands, with muscle cells in both arms contracting and relaxing in the precise order that allows my fingers to be leveraged into the positions of keys on a keyboard: while my kidneys, intestines, back muscles, heart, lungs, diaphram, stomach, eyelids, and a host of other organs do their job without me even thinking about it.

Computers seemed complex just a week ago. Now I find myself reminded that I am "fearfully and wonderfully made." The most elaborate supercomputer is dull by comparison.