A Science Lesson

I love learning new stuff.

Which is a good thing, because I'm doing a whole lot of that lately. Twenty years after receiving my teaching degree I finally have a classroom of my own. Trained to be a high school English teacher, I had to laugh at God's mischievous choice of placing me in a 6-8th grade classroom teaching pretty much everything EXCEPT English.

While I consider myself a human of at least moderate intelligence and awareness, I am shocked daily by the things I don't know.

For example, did you know that glaciers are totally cool? Pun not in the least intended. Well, maybe a little bit. And did you know that the United States owns Puerto Rico?? You probably did. But I didn't.

And then there's the mysterious pi (I actually know what it means now!), the infinite awesomeness of maps and the comical War of 1812 involvement of Mackinac Island. All new and so very interesting.

The newest, most intriguing entry in the Things I Didn't Know category involves bodies. We are in the midst of a Human Biology and Health unit in 7th-8th grade science. (The reproductive system comes up in a week or two - pray for me.)

What an absorbing and mysterious subject it is, learning about what is inside the human body. So far we have marveled at the strength of bones, the resiliency of muscles, and the many functions of the epidermis.

The current lesson is about the circulatory system. Want to guess how many times your hearts beats in a day? A hundred thousand times! Doesn't that just beat all? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Every day since before you were born it has kept pumping away, never tiring, never complaining, never asking for a break. Such a miracle. How, I wonder often, can one look at the marvels inside the body and say there is no Creator?

But that's not my point. It's just a bonus side thought.

The thing I really wanted to tell you about is red blood cells.

Okay, so the job of the red blood cell is to zip through your lungs, pick up some oxygen, and then truck around your body delivering its cargo wherever it might be needed. Your body has lots of red blood cells - about 37 trillion of them. They look like little red doughnuts. But here's the part that really got my attention.

Every second - every second mind you - two MILLION of your red blood cells die.

That thought absolutely creeps me out.

Eventually those dead cells are recycled into new living cells - the job of the spleen, I believe - but that still means that all the time, every moment of the day, I am walking around with millions and millions of dead things in me.

I am full of life. And yet I am full of death. It is in me, in every part of me, inescapable, a part of my very definition. The thought gives me the shivers. Makes me want to somehow swat at myself with a rag the way I would at mold, trying not to touch, cringing and saying eww eww eww.

A body full of death. This is what we are.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Christ Jesus our Lord! Romans 7:24-25a

It gives me the shivers sometimes, thinking about how much there is in me that I don't want to have there.

I probably look like a pretty decent person from the outside, at least of average good-ness. But I know what lies within. I know the urges, the weaknesses, the pride-driven selfishnesses that race around my insides, making mockery of that which looks like goodness from the outside of my skin.

It helps a little, I guess, to remember that I'm not alone. We all live in bodies of death. The person next to me who seems so good - they, too, are full of that which makes them cringe.

Who will rescue us? Who will take this thing that is so full of wrongness and make it right?

Thanks be to God through Christ Jesus our Lord. You know the answer. The kids in Sunday School know the answer. It's Jesus. Only Jesus.

He takes this evil that is within me, and with the shedding of His own dear blood He makes my ever-thumping heart pure and good in the eyes of my Heavenly Father.

And icky, creepy, inescapable death is replaced with life, flowing to every part of me and delivering the fresh air of forgiveness.

So I guess what I'm saying is...Jesus is sort of like a spleen.

See? You learn something new every day.