Unexpected Things
God does unexpected things. Things that awe; things that give a taste of the glory that it is to come. Sometimes awe comes by events and sometimes by profound understandings of things we didn’t know.
I had one such experience about food. It was a process of putting one bio fact after another together.
I knew that glucose was tied into giving us energy and I knew the formulas and diagrams, but I couldn’t wrap my head around exactly what was going on. How could an apple keep me moving and thinking for 24 hours by somehow individually energizing the 75 trillion cells in my body? When the answer exploded in my mind, it forever changed my trips to the supermarket into holy places, into “My Lord and My God” Thomas-type experiences. (Jn.20:28)
Here’s just one part of that earth-shaking understanding.
Mighty Mito’s and Super Spinners!
You have tiny hotdog-shaped containers in your cells, usually between 10 and 20 out them. Think of them as Mighty Mitochondria. They are where your might comes from! Inside them are ribbons called cristae standing upright like curving walls to a maze you might run through.
On top of the rounded tops of the cristae walls are molecular machines, much like electric motors. (Yellow above) They look like generators inside Hoover Dam in Arizona and are arranged like wind turbines on a hilltop.(see picture below) These unbelievable nano-motors are so incredibly small that you could put 100 trillion on the tip of a pin!
These protein motors spin, but not like the slow spinning generators in Hoover dam. Hoover’s only reach 180 revolutions per minute. These beyond-tech motors whirl at varying speeds topping 9000 spins a minute–150 per second! The spin and the rate of the spin are ultimately responsible for generating the energy for EVERYTHING you do from climbing mountains, to dancing ballet, to reading one of these words on this page, to blinking your eyes.
Every one of your cells has from 30,000-300,000 magnificent spinning motors. AND, EVERY ONE IN EVERY CELL MUST KEEP SPINNING. They can’t stop… or you stop. DOA.
The lowly apple is a spin-causer. It’s one of the supply houses that we use to get the right molecules–glucose–to the motors. Its individual glucose molecules number more than every sand grain on earth and each divinely-engineered molecule of sugar does the weirdest thing.
Atomic Nuclei BB’s
Sugars, including the sugar in your sugar bowl, have atomic nuclei which can be ripped off them and used to spin the motors like flowing water spins a water wheel or a turbine in a dam. After you take your apple down, it’s parts get distributed to the hot dog mitochondria in your cells all over your body. THE APPLE IS PROVIDES A STREAM OF HYDROGEN NUCLEI WHICH ACT LIKE A RIVER OF BB’S RUSHING THROUGH THE MOTORS. These mighty sugar-proton rivers keep your hundreds of thousands of motors in each of your trillions of cells spinning night and day at ridiculously high speeds. A lowly apple is essentially a 3,000,000 trillion high-speed proton motors spinner!
When I realized that, it shocked me. Apples and fantastically fast spins never connected for me. My only words to God were, “Oh God…I had NO idea!”
You and Astonishment
God created unseen molecular complexities like this all over the place to make us and our world work. The journey into His Deep Science is one of the most mind-boggling journeys the human mind can ever undertake. But God doesn’t stop there. He preforms events in our lives which carry the same astonishment.
Moses headed out to work with his sheep one day and the God of Creation shocked him by appearing to him through an ordinary bush that was on fire.. but wasn’t burning. Abraham and Sarah pretty much gave up on their hope in the Living God when three strangers appeared out of nowhere. These messengers from heaven brought them the absolutely incredible news that God was going to enable them to supernaturally have a child…Their God-promise fulfillment was on the way.
Joseph was cheerfully digging the gold out of every new day as he served his new friends, his fellow inmates in the beyond-hope prison of the pyramid builders. But then God Himself moved and a message came that the ruler of the pyramid people wanted to see him. God then acted in beyond-belief ways and his life changed on a dime.
God astonishes. He does ”awesome things which we do not expect”–Isaiah 64:3. He does things which build the Unexpected Beauty of His intentions. He fulfills His perfect faithfulness.
We can rejoice always. The unseen God of the apple and the spinning motors–and every other wonderful and beautiful thing–cannot neglect anything. Perfect Faithfulness always moves in the perfect time.
Not only is God faithful, He is perfectly faithful. God exactly understands us, our deepest desires, the journey we have traveled, and the hope in Him we have clung to. And He meets us in His perfection with His perfect answers. There is no experience on earth comparable to God meeting one of His sons or daughters with His perfect answers.
"You have worked wonders, plans formed long ago in perfect faithfulness." - Isaiah 25:1