“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

                                                            Psalm 139:14

On September 5, 1977, the Voyager I space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral.  

It has been speeding through space at an average speed of thirty-eight thousand miles per hour ever since, almost a million miles per day. Voyager I is the first spacecraft to travel beyond the he­liopause into interstellar space. (Had to look those words up. Heliopause is an oblong area of about 11 billion miles where the sun’s magnetic field still affects everything in it. Interstellar space is the area beyond where the heliopause stops. I would put that in layman’s terms . . . but I can’t because it’s beyond my comprehension. Let’s just go with it’s a LONG way away and it’s BIG!)

As the space probe travels through space, NASA continuously calculates its distance from Earth. On the day that I’m writing this, Voyager I is 13,490,006,617 miles from Earth and counting. (Again, beyond my comprehension but I’m guessing that’s somewhere on the other side of Greensboro.)

Even if I don’t completely understand all that, it’s still amazing to me. Or maybe that’s why it’s so amazing – because I don’t understand it.

But here’s the thing. It is not as amazing as you. The Voyager 1 will run out of gas (so to speak) around the year 2025. At that point, it will have traveled more than fifteen billion miles. But that is less than half the length of the DNA strands in your body if they were stretched end to end. The cumulative length of DNA in all the cells in your body is about twice the diameter of the solar system (over 32 billion miles!)

The psalmist praises God because he is “fearfully and wonderfully made.” And indeed, we are. The intricacies of the human body, the way it all interacts and functions, and the process of life that goes on inside of you thousands of times a day help us to understand that we didn’t just “happen”. We were designed and made by God in His very own image.

Whenever you’re feeling inconsequential and unimportant, remember that the God who created the heavens and the earth (and the heliopause and interstellar space) also created you and called you His greatest creation.

Father God thank you for the incredible gift of life we get to live in this creation called our body. In Jesus’ name, AMEN.