Body

Body

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—and how well I know it.

Psalm 139:13-14

Skateboarding down the cul-de-sac in front of our home, my ten-year-old son was enjoying a warm, sunny morning of vacation from school. When I heard one of those awful screams that a mother knows means something serious, I bolted outside and found Jordan lying in the middle of the street. He had experienced a freak fall off his skateboard, and although we didn’t know it at the time, his left femur (the largest bone in the body) had horizontally snapped in two.

After a ride to the hospital in an ambulance, X-rays, and a visit by the orthopedic surgeon, Jordan had surgery to place two rods vertically through his broken femur, holding the pieces in place. Jordan’s leg mended, and in the process I learned a lot about how God made the body.

After a bone breaks, an intricate process begins. “Excited repair cells invade in swarm. Within two weeks a cartilage-like sheath called callus surrounds the region and cement-laying cells enter the jellied mass. These cells are the osteoblasts, the pothole-fillers of the bone.”^a Two or three months later, a mass of new bone bulges over both sides of the broken ends of the fracture, looking like a spliced garden hose. As healing takes place, the new growth is smoothed out and the final result closely resembles the original bone.

Until that summer, I had never thought to thank God for the way he designed our bones!

Father,

As St. Augustine said, “Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.” Thank you that we are so fearfully and wonderfully made! Amen.