Blows my mind...

So I’m back and I don’t think anyone besides Susie has looked at my blog yet, but I’m having fun writing, so I’m going to keep going. Today Susie is eight weeks along the baby measures about one inch. Susie fortunately hasn’t suffered any sickness but is just more fatigued on a regular basis. If sleeping were an Olympic event she would have easily taken the gold medal before she was pregnant. Now she’s at the Tiger Woods level of sleeping. It’s amazing. I take a half hour nap and I can’t sleep at all that night. She takes a nap all afternoon, wakes up for dinner, and then goes to bed. Incredible.

The doctor gave us a book to read about pregnancy and babies and all that stuff. I’ll admit that I’m an ignorant guy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but this book starts with the very basics, and I think it starts there to give guys like me confidence and momentum to forge through the rest of the book. So when I read the first chapter and it talks about how a baby comes to live in its mommy’s tummy I think, “Hmm, I already knew that part of the story, I think I could handle another chapter or two.” Pretty slick, those writers are, because now I’m sucked in.

But then it starts to blow my mind. This is not a pregnancy book from a Christian perspective, but just reading about the development of a baby screams out that there is a God out there that loves little babies and cares for them and has designed them in an intricate manner. Psalms 139 states that he knit us together in our mother’s womb. The word “knit” is appropriate because it’s so obvious the love He pours into this process. But then my nerdy engineering mind is engaged as well by some of the medical descriptions. Let me give you an example:

While in the mother, the baby lives in a fluid filled sac called the placenta. Up until recently I had a very crude understanding that this was just a baggie whose ziploc came open when it was time for birth. But God is not that simple, this bag is amazing. As you probably know, the baby is connected with the placenta and the mother by its umbilical cord, from which the baby gets its nutrition. This is where it gets crazy. The umbilical cord contains two blood vessels; one that carries the baby’s blood to the placenta skin and one that returns it to the baby. This is how the baby gets rid of the waste in the blood. See, you and I have kidneys that filter our blood. But the baby’s blood is taken to the placenta where the waste is absorbed by the mother’s blood and filtered in her kidneys. The amazing part is that this happens without any exchange of blood between mother and baby. It’s not just a ziploc baggie.

This notion brought me back to a class I took in college called Transport Phenomena. This class dealt in part with the movement of molecules through membranes. I understood nothing. I passed thanks to partial credit for getting my name right on my exams and making friends with the teacher and the smart kids. So now there’s this placenta in Susie that is somehow moving waste material from the baby’s blood through a membrane into Susie’s blood so it can be removed from the body without exchanging any blood. Who designs this stuff?

God is so accurate in Isaiah 55 when He says that His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts higher than our thoughts.