Thursday, March 3

Getting ready for this Lenten season compelled me to open up my old college physiology book, Introduction to Human Physiology,  and revisit the circulatory system and the related systems of blood transport in the body.   I was especially interested in the heart.  After all, the overall theme of Lent is “Heart Conditions.”   That textbook has a roughly 100 page section on the circulatory system which it calls “The Transport System of the Body.”

Though the section title sounds simple, I had forgotten how much there was to learn and how complicated and fascinating it is. “We are fearfully and wonderfully made!” (Psalm 139:14b)

Using that old textbook took me back 44 years, a blessing as I reminisced. But the burden of using an old textbook is that it’s somewhat dated.  When I looked through the section on “The Characteristics of Blood Cells,” I came across some interesting facts.  Intriguing differences exist between men and women in the number of red blood cells per cubic millimeter.    In that same cubic millimeter, there are 300,000 platelets, 9000 white blood cells, and only 30 basophils! Those proportions are all fascinating, but the reason I mention “basophils” is that I had no idea what these very small and tenuous white blood cells were.  And neither did the textbook in 1974! Under the column labeled “Function,” were two words:  “not known.”    We are not omniscient.   

Four decades later, much more is known about them.  Of the five kinds of white blood cells in our body, they are the least numerous. Although they were first identified in 1879, early researchers figured they weren’t that important because they weren’t abundant. They were also hard to study because they live only one or two days! But now we know that basophils are part of “immune surveillance,” and they help identify and destroy some cancer cells.  They are important, although small in number and short-lived.

Somehow, all of this made me think of the prophet Jeremiah.  Although he wrote the largest book of the Bible, he spent much of his life as a prophet feeling he was insignificant and often ignored.   At times, he couldn’t figure it out:  “Why wouldn’t people listen to God?”  He realized that the answers were not always simple. In his 17^th  chapter he wrote these words about the complexity of the heart: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the Lord search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.’”  

All sin is selfishness.  That is simple.  But the complexity of sin/selfishness is similar to the complexity of our physiology.   Yet God is not helpless against the complexity of our sin!   And, like Jeremiah,  each  of us is important to God.  He knows precisely what our problems are – all of them.  In His omniscience, He knows every single piece of history which has made us wounded by sin or the fallout from sin. Those sorts of heartaches can lead us to feel insignificant and to distrust God. But when we look at Christ, Who “took up our infirmities and carried our diseases…,” (Isaiah 53:4) we see His specialized healing. He has searched the heart and found our problem – the big problem of sin and all of its distorted variations.

 He is our Healer.