No Small Miracles

You don’t often think of humour when you think of Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist who had an IQ even higher than mine. But he could be funny. He once said, “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” He also said, “Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.” Beautiful.

I think my favourite Albert Einstein quote is this one: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.” An atheist with whom I correspond once asked me, “Can you honestly tell me that you have personally experienced a miracle?” My response at the time was less than convincing, but I have a better answer now. Have I ever experienced a miracle? The truth is: I have never not. It’s bad English but it’s true.

Let me explain myself.

Did you know that, laid end to end, your blood vessels could circle the equator four times? That’s 160,000 kilometres. Or about halfway to the moon. Not impressed yet? Then take your genetic code, which is absolutely unique to you, stretch it end to end, it will reach to the sun and back more than 600 times, and you, my friend, will be sunburned.

Have you experienced a miracle? No? Think again. Put your hand on your heart.

The human heart has just one job to do. It beats. Each hour it dispenses 70 gallons of blood. Walk ten miles a day and your body got seven gallons to the mile. Weighing less than a pound, it beats slightly more than once a second, 100,000 times a day, 3.5 billion times in a lifetime. These aren’t gentle thumps, they are gigantic jolts, powerful enough to send blood spurting three metres if the aorta is severed. Powerful enough, scientists figure, that during the average lifetime the human heart does enough work to lift a one-ton object 150 miles into the air. And it’s not just one pump, but two: one ships blood around the body, the other to the lungs. And if they aren’t in perfect sync every single time, you’re in trouble.

Have you ever experienced a miracle? You have never…not.

Look in the mirror. Scientists estimate that your nose can recognise a trillion different scents! See your eye? The retina has 100 million neurons that conduct close to ten billion calculations a second, transmitting data to the brain at 10 million bits per second.

Still unconvinced about miracles? Draw a deep breath. Waking or sleeping, you gulp and process about 4,000 gallons of air in 20,000 breaths a day. That’s around 7.3 million between birthdays, and 672 million over the course of your life.

The very last verse in the very last chapter of the book of Psalms says, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” Psalm 139:13-14 (NIV) provides good reason: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Are you still breathing? It’s not too late to marvel at the miracles all around you: a heartbeat, a wrinkled nose, a deep breath.

It’s not too late to wake up and say, “Lord, I didn’t know I was breathing as I slept, but here I am. I didn’t think this old world would rotate again, but the sun is up and here we are. Thank you.”

May we live today in awe and wonder at God’s greatness and love.

After all, “there are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”