I once read some interesting facts about the human body that amazed me.

A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day. An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.

A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph compared to a sneeze that can exceed 100 mph. You blink your eyes about 20,000 times a day. Your heart beats about 100,000 times a day.

Your body contains eight pints of blood. Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels. Placed end to end, all your body’s blood vessels would measure 62,000 miles.

The average brain weighs three pounds. There are 10 million nerve cells in your brain. Your brain sends messages at the rate of 240 mph. The small intestines are about 25 feet long; however, the large intestines are three times wider than the small intestines. About 400 gallons of blood flow through your kidneys every day.

Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our skeleton. We have 230 joints in our bodies. Children have 20 first teeth and adults have 32 teeth.

After conception in our mothers’ wombs, every human spent about half an hour as a single cell. At only nineteen days after life begins, your eyes begin to develop. Eventually, each eye will have six million cones, which help you see color and 120 million rods, which help you see black and white.

Your heart begins to beat at day 22 in the womb. By the sixth week, brain waves are detectable and at eight weeks, every organ is in place and the fetus can begin to hear. Weeks nine and ten, teeth begin to form. A baby can turn its head and it can also hiccup.

An unborn baby’s fingerprints appear at three months, when a mother usually finds out she’s pregnant. By months five and six, mothers can feel their baby move. He or she is now twelve inches long or more and weighs up to one and a half pounds.

All of these facts remind me of the words of King David who wrote, “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret….Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed” (Psalm 139:13-17 NKJ).

“So why is that significant?” asks Bill Hendricks in his book, The Person Called You. “You are not random. You are not here by chance….Your presence on the planet is neither luck more a mistake…Someone put you here. Someone intentionally thought through who you should be and carefully worked to bring that concept to reality. That alone invests you with intrinsic dignity and value.”

– Jan White is our award-winning columnist. She can be reached at jwhite@andycable.com.