Pastor’s Moment
You aren’t just surrounded by miracles; you are one By Mark Batterson
I know people who say they have never experienced a miracle. Maybe you’re one of them. But I would argue that you have never not experienced one. It may seem like you’re sitting still right now, but it’s an illusion of miraculous proportions. Planet Earth is spinning around its axis at an equatorial speed of 1,040 miles per hour. Simultaneously, we’re also speeding through space at an average velocity of 67,108 miles per hour. That’s not just faster than a speeding bullet. It’s 87 times faster than the speed of sound.
So even on a day when you feel like you didn’t get much done, you did travel 1,599,793 miles through space! And to top things off, the Milky Way Galaxy is spinning like a top at the mind-boggling rate of 483,000 mph. If that isn’t miraculous, I don’t know what is. Yet when was the last time you thanked God for keeping us in orbit? I’m guessing never! “Lord, I wasn’t sure we’d make the full rotation today, but You did it again!” We just don’t pray that way. Why? Because God is so good at what God does that we take it for granted. Now here’s my point. You already believe God for the big miracles like they’re no big deal. The trick is learning to trust Him for the little ones.
Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything.” I unapologetically believe that everything is.
Trillions of chemical reactions are taking place in your body every second of every day—you are inhaling oxygen, metabolizing energy, managing equilibrium, manufacturing hormones, fighting antigens, filtering stimuli, purifying toxins, and circulating six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. If the blood vessels in your body were laid end to end, they’d circle the earth two and a half times! Your brain has the ability to perform ten quadrillion calculations per second using only twenty watts of power. And its storage capacity is 2.5 petabytes. The entire print collection of the Library of Congress is estimated to be 10 terabytes. So your brain has the capacity to store 250 libraries of congress.
If your personal genome sequence were written out longhand, it would be a three-billion-word book. The King James Version has 783,137 words, so your genetic code is the equivalent of approximately four thousand Bibles. If your personal genome sequence were an audio book, and you were read at a rate of one double helix per second, it would take nearly a century to put you into words! My point? You aren’t just surrounded by miracles. You are one.
What if we started living like it? How would it change our daily lives? How would it change the way we treat the walking, talking miracles we live with and work with each day? One last miracle. You will take approximately 23,000 breaths today. As a lifelong asthmatic, I don’t take them for granted. Each one is the miracle of life. We’d be a lot happier, healthier, and holier if we thanked God for each one.
Mark Batterson is winner of the 2018 ECPA Christian Book Award. He’s the founder and lead pastor of National Community Church