"I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well"
wonderful are Your works: Let the praise resound to God that the signals in our mind cross the mind/brain barrier and then travel through the body and produce a physical muscular action in our body. We still do not understand all the steps in that process. How do thoughts become actions? It is wonderful! God thought up this machine we call our body and its reproducing nature and its internal complexities. Do not fail to see the wonder of God in what is in front of us just because you are around it all the time. The great danger of our secular society is that it seeks to dampen the glory of God in the creation and in the wonder of humanity. We must fight to strip away the ridiculous notion that life just arises and it is no big deal. It is a very big deal that we are alive and that we work. It is a huge deal that there are levels of complexity and integration between cells and systems that we still do not understand. Give God the praise and the glory. It is a big deal that many of these systems cannot have arisen over time with only chance and natural selection as the mechanism. Allow your mind to worship God for the supreme genius that He is. Sometimes we throw around the idea that He is omniscient (all knowing) and we take for granted what He accomplished in the universe. Allow yourself to be wowed and dumbstruck by the brilliance of what God has done.
and my soul knows it very well: This is a very interesting reference to the soul's knowledge and self-awareness within the body. Your soul is only a temporary resident of this body you now inhabit. It will one day receive another body which it will inhabit. We have the interesting ability to look at the housing that we have been given and marvel at its construction, its mobility, its abilities, its internal orientation, etc.
We so often take our bodies for granted. We do not appreciate the level of complexity involved in these things we call bodies actually working. We have often become so outward focused that we take our body's functionality for granted until it doesn't work. We view our interests, desires, skills, strengths, and talents as givens instead of gifts. God, through the Psalmist David, is telling us to stop regularly and give thanks for this mechanism by which you interact with the world. It really is amazing.
If you were given different hormones or different sections of your brain connections weakened or your muscle attachments were in different places or were made of different types of muscle fiber, your whole life would be different.
Realize that your body is not you. It is a wonderful, complex mechanism that houses you, but it is not you. It has significant interaction and influence on you, but it is not you. God has given this mechanism some marvelous characteristics and some amazing abilities for you to use. He has also withheld some abilities and withheld some influences so that you will be ready to fulfill His purpose for your life. It is your lining up with that purpose that allows you to be fulfilled and satisfied. You cannot just launch out on your own, hoping that you find a purpose other than God's that will fulfill you. Look at your body; look at the talents that God has given you and give thanks for what God has given you.
Until tomorrow,
Gil Stieglitz