Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Indeed!

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
--Psalm 139:13, 14

When I read this statement above from the Psalms, the first thing that jumped out at me was the word knit. It producing a fascinating image,  the nine month process of being "assembled" by invisible hands, stitched together little by little, a miniature human being.

The second notion had to do with our astounding complexity as a human species. Think abut this. When fully unwound, the DNA strand in a single human cell is roughly 2 meters long, or 6.6 feet. However, the nucleus of a human cell is only about 6 micrometers in diameter, so DNA is tightly packaged within the cell to fit. This is similar to packing 24 miles of thread into a tennis ball. 

Now consider this: The human body contains roughly 37.2 trillion cells, with the exact number varying depending on a person's size. For example, a 2023 analysis of more than 1,500 papers estimates that the average adult male has 36 trillion cells, while the average adult female has 28 trillion. 

If you stretch the DNA strands from those 36 trillion cells and lay them end to end, the DNA from one adult male would stretch 36 trillion x 6.6 feet, which is 237.6 trillion feet or 45 billion miles. When Saturn is closest to the earth it is only 746 million miles away. 45 billion miles of DNA would stretch from Earth to Saturn and back 30 times. (Can someone check my math?)

I don't know about you, but this strikes me as pretty remarkable.

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1 mile = 5280 feet