Your Body: Fantabulous “….awesomely and wonderfully made….”
The night the first Americans landed on the moon, we lay in our sleeping bags atop a clipped-off peak of a Montana mountain. Not having seen another person during a three day climb, we communed uniquely with those moon men, our imaginations stretched, startled and stunned by immensity.
There they were hanging out in a fragment of the Milky Way which streamed with magnified clarity across the sky like splashed milk. Here we were on a pinpoint of Earth unable to comprehend what we were seeing.
But there is another “Milky Way” in the opposite direction of unseeable minuteness that I discovered when trying to comprehend the world of hormones in our bodies (i.e, January).
Frankly, it is such a complex, integral, unfathomable system that I couldn’t express its wonder! So, I’ll focus on just one facet that gave us all our start in life, a mother’s milk.
Wondrously, a newborn’s unique needs are ideally met by the nutrients of a mother’s milk, from immunity to growth.
Wondrously, a mother’s milk changes its composition to meet the ever changing needs of the baby’s growth! Never having met the kid, how does a mother know such complex recipes?
Wondrously, a tiny bit of pink tissue in the mother’s breast “magically” calculate the exact and intricate mixture of nutrients the baby needs out there in the world.
Wondrously, while the baby is still splashing around in the inner puddle, one hormone prepares the milk glands in the mother’s breast while another hormone puts up a “Not Yet!” sign for months. Until near birth another smart hormone says, “Slowly take your foot off the brake.” Who calls those timely shots?
Wondrously, when the baby sucks, nerve endings in the mother’s breast communicate directly to Hypo (remember him?) who somehow opens the spigot. Mother doesn’t have to prepare or warm anything.
Wondrously, hormones carry messages to the cells, which are not conscious or intelligent, but are predesigned to carry out functions. Thus they mix the formulas for every stage- a formula which science labs have tried to duplicate for decades and can only come close.
Wondrously, we can’t really say a baby sucks; they only squeeze the nozzle. Actually, another hormone, neurally alerted, secretes a message to all the breast tissue cells to “Contract!” and thus nudge the milk to the nipple for ready consumption.
Wondrous is the word for the unbelievably intricate system in conjunction with all other systems that converge and cooperate to give us bodily life. The “Milky Way” had its way with us foundationally while we were yet awakening to our own “awesome and wonderful” existence in a fantabulous body.
HOPEfully we will evidence soul-full reverence for the creative artistry of God!
~Earl Laman, Health Ministry