Wonderfully Made - Part 4 - The Liver

David, the author of most of the psalms in our Bible wrote that he was ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. In this series of short studies, we are looking at five parts of our wonderfully made human bodies, and finding out what spiritual lessons they have for us today. 

Our third subject for study in the series is our liver, the largest of our internal organs, situated on the right hand side of the belly. It is also one of our most complex organs, doing about 500 jobs at once, including fighting off infection; neutralizing poisons; manufacturing essential proteins and hormones; controlling blood sugar and helping with the clotting of our blood. However the liver's main job is to clean up the blood coming from the digestive tract, before passing it on to the rest of the body. At any one time, the liver contains about one eighth of all the blood in our bodies, and it pumps out about one and a half litres of purified blood per minute.

Wonderfully Made - Part 3 - Blood

Our third subject for study in the series is our liver, the largest of our internal organs, situated on the right hand side of the belly. It is also one of our most complex organs, doing about 500 jobs at once, including fighting off infection; neutralizing poisons; manufacturing essential proteins and hormones; controlling blood sugar and helping with the clotting of our blood. However the liver's main job is to clean up the blood coming from the digestive tract, before passing it on to the rest of the body. At any one time, the liver contains about one eighth of all the blood in our bodies, and it pumps out about one and a half litres of purified blood per minute.

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.

Wonderfully Made - Part 1 - Skin

WONDERFULLY MADE – FIVE SHORT STUDIES ON THE MAKE-UP OF THE HUMAN BODY

Introduction

David, the author of most of the psalms in our Bible wrote that ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. In this series of short studies, we will be looking at five parts of our wonderfully made bodies, and finding out what spiritual lessons they have for us today. 

1. We’ll start on the outside with our skin, which is far more than merely the outer protective covering of our bodies! It’s actually the largest organ in our bodies, covering an area of up to two square metres, or 18 square feet in the old currency, and making up to nearly 1/6^thof the weight of the human body.