Your Healthy Heart

by Terri Kammerzell

Truth of Genesis Ministry Partner

This Tuesday (the 29th) is World Heart Day. How will you celebrate? The World Heart Federation has some recommendations, such as being active, saying “no” to tobacco, living your best life, and fulfilling your dreams. As for me, I thought I would celebrate by reminding my friends (and the rest of you) how incredibly our hearts were designed!

What is one amazing feature of the human heart?
It pumps blood through arteries under the skin, covering about twelve thousand miles per day, enough to wrap around Earth every two days.

Think about that! If you sat in a boat at the Prime Meridian in the Gulf of Guinea, a little south of Ghana or Togo in Africa, and I said, “Ready, set, go!” and you travelled by boat, train, car, bus, or whatever means necessary, and arrived in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, some 2000 miles east of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Sea, you would have travelled approximately the same number of miles as your blood travels throughout your body in one day. (This “visual” might be more incredible if you were holding a globe, but even if you pull out an atlas or find an interactive map online, I think you would be pretty amazed by this!)

God designed your heart to support your body in fascinating ways! Here are some more quick facts about that ticker you were given:

• To protect your hard-working, blood-pumping muscle and keep it in place in your body, God double-bagged it: first, in a serous pericardium, which is a sac that is attached tightly to your heart; and then in a fibrous pericardium which anchors your heart to your diaphragm. Together, these make up the pericardial sac.
• Your blood is always flowing through two separate circuits: one to bring the blood to the lungs to filter out carbon dioxide, and one to transport the blood from your lungs to the rest of your body. That means your amazing heart actually has two pumps in one!
• God built a regulator into your heart that keeps it beating both continuously and consistently. Your heart beats without you telling it to because it is part of your autonomic nervous system. If your heart stopped beating, or if it beat too slow or too fast, the consequences could be just as deadly as having no heart at all. So, in the right atrium of your heart, God built in some very special muscle tissue called the “sinoatrial node,” which sends electric signals to cause your heart to contract as it should.

Wow! It’s no wonder David wrote in Psalm 139:14, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well” (NKJV).

For me, the science of the heart is fascinating, especially when considering the Designer Who created it with such irreducible complexity. But I’ve gotta tell you, the whole time I’ve been studying the resources and writing this article, I keep singing the hymn “Since Jesus Came into My Heart,” lyrics by Rufus H. McDaniel (1914):

What a Wonderful change in my life has been wrought
Since Jesus came into my heart;
I have light in my soul for which long I had sought,
Since Jesus came into my heart.
Since Jesus came into my heart,
Since Jesus came into my heart;
Floods of joy o’er my soul like the sea billows roll,
Since Jesus came into my heart.

Is Jesus in your heart today? Have you surrendered your life to Him? If not, it would be a great day to visit this website to learn how to make that a reality! This is the very best heart-healthy choice you will ever make in your whole life.

Don’t just take my word for it! Visit YouFormedMe.com/humanBody/heart.html to read, watch, and listen to supporting research and commentary from scientists, doctors, theologians, and more!
This blog is from a special series of “Creation Fun Facts” by Terri Kammerzell, starting from June 10, 2020. Read the introduction at TruthOfGenesis.com/blogs/building-a-biblical-defense-of-creation.