Day 41.

Among the many questions I struggled with were how did God cope with all these individual relationships all at once. How could it be just Him & me? This conundrum passed away one day when I (an Australian), was jammed packed at church in Brazil, not able to understand one word that was being spoken. I was there to worship and to listen to His Spirit. I had been reading two books that week and suddenly, as the Spirit of God Ministered to me, amidst the Portuguese that I could not understand I had another epiphany. The two books came together as one indelible thought. F.W.Boreham (The Luggage of Life) had asked how “ He who created the worlds and inhabits all time can have the patience to hear me speak to Him about my examinations, and my love affairs, and my prospects.” (p163) And which of us when we dared to be honest have not asked the same question about how God can hear millions of prayers all at once. The movie “Bruce Almighty” dealt with this in a powerful yet humorous way. That movie shot to the top of my favourites list.

Our problem, when we ask this question, is that we conceive God in our own image and we make Him too small. The other book “In His Image” By Philip Yancey & Dr Paul Brand was discussing the complexity of the human body & particularly the brain. Through pages 109 to 137 of that book Paul & Philip are drawing the analogy of the human body as applied to the spiritual body of Christ. I however saw something different as the two books of the week came together in that Brazilian church!

The brain we are told is performing 5 trillion operations every second coordinating the catalogue of 5 senses plus all the other vital functions that are taking place, informing my brain of things like muscle tension, pressure on the joints and tendons. My brain knows the tilt of my head, the bend of my elbow, the position of my left foot. Other senses inform me of lunchtime, bladder & bowel capacity. Below the conscious there are automatic controls on temperature, blood pressure, infection control and a multitude of chemical processes.

Five trillion operations per second! Apparently billions of computations are required to recognise a piece of music in just seconds. Recognising the distance between a ball and the moon are processes that occur with blinding speed & no conscious effort. As you sit here reading this your eyes are capable of interpreting your environment with a complexity the beggars the imagination and defies the evolutionists, because no evolutionist can explain what a half evolved eye was doing while it waited eons to be switched on in working order. 127,000,000 cells called rods and cones line up in rows as the “seeing “ elements that receive light and transmit messages to the brain. The rods are so sensitive that the smallest measurable amount of light, one photon, can excite them. At optimum conditions the eye can detect a candle at 20 kilometres. Your ears are processing sound as you sit here, picking up the slightest movement around you. Your ears are capable of recognising 300,000 tones. All this is done by vibrations in the ear, that the brain must then interpret. There are 25,000 auditory cells in the ear and these are connected by thousands of neurons (wires) to the brain. TBC 576