“Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Luke 12:7
I am fortunate that I have never had to deal with a complete loss of my hair. However, being on certain medications, including a kind of injectable low dose chemotherapy, has given my once precious thick hair online of its own. It has turned thin & straight, to kinky & frizzy. Now it is somewhere in between, being both thin & frizzy, straight to kinky. Every time I go to get it cut the beautician exclaims how it feels like straw or even pretend doll’s hair.
When you live daily with a chronic illness it can be easy to become discouraged when your body doesn’t work the way you wish it would. Perhaps you feel like every muscle aches in your body. Or that you are carrying around an extra gallon of water in the bloating. Maybe your medications have caused you to lose some hair, or you wonder how you could have gotten the infection when you are so careful about sanitizing your h&s. Well, here are some interesting facts about our bodies.
As you read through them you may want to celebrate the miracle that despite what is going on in your body incorrectly, there is still so much that is working well.
There are:
• 10 gallons of water in your body
• 22 muscles used when you speak
• 206 bones in your body
• 100,000 hairs on your scalp
• 32 million bacteria living on each square inch of your body
• 2.5 billion heartbeats in the average lifetime*
If you are like me, there are some days you may feel like those 202 muscles that help you speak are overworked. Or perhaps you too have had joint replacements. I wonder, am I down to 202 bones now after my recent surgery in my h&? Our body is a wondrous, unexplainable, amazing miracle that God has blessed each human being with, despite how we may treat it or our lack of underst&ing about it.
No matter how poorly you may physically feel at this moment, take comfort in the fact that if God cares about how many hairs (or lack thereof) are on your very head, He cares about every pain, every gasp you make from a sharp movement, every sleepless night, & even every sneeze. Nothing you are feeling is too small to matter to Him.
Lisa Copen is the founder of Rest Ministries & has lived with rheumatoid arthritis since 1993. She recently had joint replacement surgery on the four fingers of her left h&.