Friday, February 27, 2009

Miracle

Isn't new life amazing? A new human being is created. A unique personality. He inherits half of his genes from his mother and half from his father. Two small gametes combine to form a zygote, a single cell too small to see with the naked eye, that divides over and over again through mitosis. The first few times the cells divide, each copy is exactly the same (and, in fact, if you were to go in and separate the first four cells from each other, they would each become an individual and you'd have identical quadruplets). Eventually, as the embryo grows, cells are given separate jobs. Some become bone cells, some skin cells, some nervous tissue cells. Science understands this process fairly well.
Eventually a baby is born. He knows, instinctively, how to cry, how to breathe, how to eat.
It's night. The newborn baby cries very little, but he's crying now. I pick him up from his crib and he immediately calms. He looks around, curious about his new world. I stare at him in wonder.
Science can explain it. But that doesn't make it any less of a miracle.

6 comments:

Katrina said...

Amen!

Tim said...

Note also:
Just because it's a miracle doesn't mean that science can't explain it.
God works through natural laws; science tries to understand how those natural laws work.
Without the miracle, we don't appreciate life like we should.
Without the science, we face a much scarier world where death and disease are much more omnipresent.

Jenni said...

The wonder and awe doesn't go away either. Almost every day I look at one kiddo or the other and think wow, think of how he started...


Incidentally, after 9 months of constant contact and and perfect temperature and hearing mommy's heartbeat/breathing, it's only to be expected that the little guy will have a hard time dealing with sleeping alone.

Jenni said...

PS, when do we get to see pictures?!

Tim said...

He actually does great sleeping alone, as long as he's swaddled up.
Pictures are coming. I'm kind of waiting for an upgraded PC (which should come in the mail shortly) as our old one (which I bought used about 5 years ago) is terribly slow and a pain to work with.

Brasileira said...

Thank you for a beautiful post. I'm so happy that you, too, can be experiencing the miracle that we are enjoying here.