Are you affected by the weather?

What was the first thing you noticed this morning when you got up? Maybe I should reword that. I am not thinking about your beautiful spouse or children. My question really is – did you notice if it was sunny or rainy? Did the weather annoy you or concern you?

Passed By

Some summers are really a bit of a non-event. I’ll not go into the precise statistics but it seems that often summers come and go with little evidence that we actually had one.

Life is like that for a lot of us. Some people feel that it has passed them by. The dreams of yesterday never quite became the reality of today. The wish list remained just that – a wish list. If only.  Life need not be like that. I believe that God’s desire for humanity is to lift our gaze from the mundane things of life and to give us hope; but more of that in a moment.

Wonderfully Made - Part 2 - Hair

Our second object of study in the series is, like our first, on the outside of our bodies, that is our hair, especially hair on our heads. 

First some basic facts: each hair grows out of what’s called a follicle for about three to five years, and on average, we lose 50 to 100 strands of hair a day from our heads. When a hair is shed, its follicle rests for about three months before starting to grow hair again. On average a hair grows out of its follicle at a rate of about half a millimetre per day, or about six inches (15 millimetres) per year. Given that on a full head of hair, we have about 100,000 individual hairs (although, interestingly blonds have more!), then that’s 50 metres (or yards) of total hair growth every single day, or in total over ten miles (six kilometres) of hair in a year! In fact, apart from bone marrow, hair is the fastest growing tissue in the body, with facial hair growing the fastest of all. Balding only begins to become visible once you’ve lost over half of the hairs from your head.

Blood

All photos are courtesy of Unsplash 

Using an average of 80 beats per minute, the heart beats around 115,000 times a day. Although a typical adult human body contains near to 5 litres of blood, the heart pumps the equivalent of 7,500 litres of blood a day through around 60,000 miles of blood vessels. That is equivalent to more than twice the circumference of the earth’s surface, and some of the blood vessels are as thin as 5 microns — that is 5 thousandths of a millimetre, thinner than a human hair.

Do you think you are good enough for God?

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

When we talk to others, there are always things that we do not mind them hearing and other things that we would be so ashamed of if they became public knowledge.

Some people will often tell you how they helped others, did a good deed or gave money to a charity. These things are good, of course, and we should do more things like this. However, it is possible to become proud or boastful about them.