I have closed my eyes. My shoes are kicked off, and I am wiggling the small bones in my right foot. Exposed, they are half the width of a pencil, and yet they support my weight in walking. I cup my hand over my ear and hear the familiar seashell phenomenon, actually the sound of blood cells rushing through the capillaries in my head. I stretch out my left arm and try to imagine the millions of muscle cells eagerly expanding and contracting in concert. I rub my finger across my arm and feel the stimulation of touch cells, 450 in each square-inch patch of skin.
Inside, my stomach, spleen, liver, pancreas, and kidneys, each packed with millions of loyal cells, are working so efficiently I have no way of perceiving their presence. Fine hairs in my inner ear are monitoring a swishing fluid, ready to alert me if I suddenly tilt off balance.
When my cells work well, I’m hardly conscious of their individual presences. What I feel is the composite of their activity. My body, composed of many parts, is one, the analogy our Bible uses for the Church.
One drawer in my medical laboratory contains neatly filed specimens of an array of cells from the human body. Separated from the body, stained with dyes and mounted in epoxy, they hardly express the churn of living cells at work inside me. But if I parade them under the microscope, certain impressions about the body take shape.
I am first struck by their variety. Chemically my cells are almost alike, but visually and functionally they are as different as the animals in a zoo. Red blood cells, discs resembling Lifesaver candies, voyage through my blood loaded with oxygen to feed the other cells. Muscle cells, which absorb so much of that nourishment, are sleek and supple, full of coiled energy. Cartilage cells with shiny black nuclei look like bunches of black-eyed peas glued tightly together for strength. Fat cells seem lazy and leaden, like bulging white plastic garbage bags jammed together.
Bone cells live in rigid structures that exude strength. Cut in cross section, bones resemble tree rings, overlapping strength with strength, offering impliability and sturdiness. In contrast, skin cells form undulating patterns of softness and texture that rise and dip, giving shape and beauty to our bodies. They curve and jut at unpredictable angles so that every person’s fingerprint is unique.
The king of cells, the one I have devoted much of my life to studying, is the nerve cell. It has an aura of wisdom and complexity about it. Spider-like, it branches out and unites the body with a computer network of dazzling sophistication. Its axons, “wires” carrying distant messages to and from the human brain, can reach a yard in length.
I never tire of viewing these specimens or thumbing through books which render cells. Individually they seem puny and oddly designed, but I know these invisible parts cooperate to lavish me with the phenomenon of life. Every second my smooth muscle cells modulate the width of my blood vessels, gently push matter through my intestines, open and close the plumbing in my kidneys. When things are going well–my heart contracting rhythmically, my brain humming with knowledge, my lymph laving tired cells–I rarely give these cells a passing thought.
But I believe these cells in my body can also teach me about larger organisms: families, groups, communities, villages, nations–and especially about one specific community of people that is likened to a body more than thirty times in the New Testament. I speak of the Body of Christ, that network of people scattered across the planet who have little in common other than their membership in the group that follows Jesus Christ.
My body employs a bewildering zoo of cells, none of which individually resembles the larger body. Just so, Christ’s Body comprises an unlikely assortment of humans. Unlikely is precisely the right word, for we are decidedly unlike one another and the One we follow… How can any organism composed of such diversity attain even a semblance of unity?…
The unifying factor is connection with and commitment to the Head. We can only find true fellowship, meaningful growth and maturity in our mutual obedience to Him.
Then we will “grow up into Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplies…makes increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love” (Eph. 4:15-16).
From Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by Dr. Paul Brand & Philip Yancey, Zondervan.