Remembering the Created
On Saturday, we paid honor to my father in law, two years after he donated his body to the University of Iowa Medical School for study. The Deeded Body Program at Iowa held a beautiful memorial service for the families of all the men and women who chose this selfless path after death.
In between heavenly medleys by a stringed quartet, medical students shared their testimonies about the importance of the program. One student confessed she had trouble understanding a complex nerve structure in the arm, even after reading textbook descriptions and hearing lecture explanations. She says she finally “got it” once she was able to see this particular nerve network in a real body.
But what struck me was how many of the students openly professed a belief in God and testified that after studying the intricate design of the human body, it would be difficult to not believe in a creator.
What I find even more amazing is that our creator desires closeness with us. Psalm 8:3-4 expresses this thought: When I consider your heavens and the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, son of man that you care for him?
While most of us will never have the opportunity to view the complexity of what lies beneath our skin, we can still focus on what’s visible as proof of our creator. We speak, we walk, we breathe, we think. We have eyelashes, eyebrows, fingernails and toenails. We have teeth to chew and ears to hear. We can all scan our bodies to add to the list, with every feature crying out for the existence of a creative designer who cares enough about his creatures to desire a relationship with us.
Towards the end of the service, the powerful song “You Raise Me Up” saturated the crowd gathered for this remembrance. One stanza, especially appropriate, as we acknowledge God’s involvement in our lives: “There is no life-no live without its hunger; each restless heart beats so imperfectly, but when you come and I am filled with wonder, sometimes, I think I glimpse eternity.”
Do you glimpse eternity when you consider your body, the work of his fingers? Today, I am pausing to thank God for giving me life and desiring to know me, his creature, more intimately.