God's Incredible Pump
The heart has fascinated man from his earliest days on this planet. Our
songs and poetry use the heart in beautiful and painful ways. Primitive
violent cultures have viewed the human heart as something special and
even included it in horrific ways in their pagan worship. The fact is
that, as man has developed technologically and scientifically, the
heart has not been diminished but exalted in our appreciation of its
incredible abilities and the design features that it demonstrates.
The heart pumps approximately 2,000 gallons of blood
every day--a total weight load of 18,650 pounds (or some nine tons). To
do this, the heart beats nearly 100,000 times a day (or 36,000,000
times a year). A 50-year-old adult's heart will have beaten
1,825,000,000 times. The heart is connected to some 60,000 miles of
blood vessels in an adult's body and will participate in moving 438
cubic feet of air through the lungs. The heart never rests and varies
its speed by a factor of three upon demand. The fluid the heart moves
is fragile, and yet the heart does no damage to it in spite of the high
pressures and rapid changes of direction the fluid takes. As mankind
has tried to design and build an artificial heart, he has found the
task to be one of the more difficult technical projects ever
encountered. Not only is there the problem of building a machine that
will not wear out, but serious problems have been encountered as blood
clots form and changes occur in blood components.
On top of all of the mechanical things the heart does, the heart has
the amazing capacity to react to changes in the environment and in
conditions. People who live in an environment that demands higher
volumes of blood to be moved have hearts that grow larger. When damage
happens to the heart, it will move to repair the damage by generating
new tissue or building blood vessels to bypass the problem. The more
you learn of the heart, the more you appreciate David's praise of God
in Psalm
139:14 when he says, "I will praise thee Lord, for I am fearfully
and wonderfully made and that my soul knoweth right well."
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Does God Exist?, MarApr04.