For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb…
Psalm 139:13, 15-17
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them!
Every vein was perfectly placed when I was in my mother’s womb. As a child, I ran and played without a thought about the miracle of my heart beating or my blood flowing. When I was a teen my body changed into womanhood, including all the normal mood swings, but I was still oblivious to the wonder of my brain directing my body parts or my veins carrying my blood. I had children and aged, but my health allowed me to come and go at will, my worst ailments being a backache or headache, so I was still mindless of the miracle of the daily ebb and flow of my body… until now.
Now I am mindful of my heart beating irregularly, of the intricacies and cooperation my unseen body parts, of the miraculous complexities of the human body. I had a stroke, went into a-fib, and, this week, had a cardiac ablation. We call a CT (computed tomography) of the brain, the loop recorder in my chest, and the ablation procedure modern day medical miracles.
As I contemplated what was about to happen—a doctor would insert catheters into two veins, directing them up into my heart, and sensors would record my heart’s electricity, identifying the area causing the arrhythmia and create small scars in my heart to block the irregular rhythms—I was awed. Yes, a modern day medical miracle. But it pales in comparison to the miracle of my creation.
God wove those veins in place when He formed me. They were in place when I toddled and grew and aged. Throughout those years my heart beat with regularity, until it didn’t. The mercy is that I overcame the physical challenges of stroke and a-fib. But, with all due respect, I must put modern medicine in its place because, as astonishing as it is, it pales in comparison to the miracle of God’s intricate creation. Indeed, medicine only discovers the details of God’s amazing design and learns aspects of the human body’s functionality that God ordered. He is my Creator, Designer, Sustainer, Healer. Selah.
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (verse 14).
BARBARA HIGBY 