The Cross In Our Bodies

An email with this information came through my email this week, and I found it fascinating. It was about the cellular structure in the human body, absolutely essential to human life.

Since I am medically fascinated, and a science nerd, I kept reading. I remember loving my Anatomy classes in college. And I loved my Gross Anatomy classes in graduate school. Partly because I had amazing teachers, and partly because I find all things medical pretty fascinating. I was in awe as I learned more and more about God's handiwork. I remember so many times thinking “How can ANYONE deny that a Creator did all of this?” One day I’ll have to do an entire post on some of the absolutely incredible things the human body can do. It’s unbelievable. I digress.

In this email, Louie Giglio (a big time—and very legit—Christian speaker and author) was talking about how inconceivably BIG our God is. How He spoke the universe into being. How He breathes stars out of His mouth that are huge raging balls of fire. He went on for quite awhile. Then He went on to speak of how this star-breathing, universe creating God ALSO knitted our human bodies together with amazing detail and wonder.

Louie went on to talk about how we can trust that the God who created all this, also has the power to hold it all together when things seem to be falling apart; how our loving Creator is also our sustainer. No matter what.

And then, he started going all Dr. McDreamy on us. He started talking about laminin. I knew about laminin, thanks to my biology and zoology degree. Wikipedia describes “laminins” this way: Laminins are a family of proteins that are an integral part of the structural scaffolding of basement membranes in almost every animal tissue.

Here is the gist: Laminins are what hold us together... LITERALLY. They are cell adhesion molecules.. They are what holds one cell of our bodies to the next cell. Without them, we would literally fall apart. The entire human body is made up of billions and zillions of cells. Although I knew what laminins were, I had no idea what they looked like.

But now I do. And I have thought about it a thousand times since. Here is what the structure of laminin looks like... and this is now a doctored up Christian portrayal of it. If you were to look up laminin in any scientific/medical piece of literature, this is what you will see:


Wow. Amazing. Awe inspiring. Divine. Holy. All-knowing. Omnipresent. The glue that holds us together... ALL of us... Is in the shape of the cross. Something tells me this is not a coincidence.

Colossians 1:15-17 says: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; All things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things HOLD TOGETHER."

Call me crazy or nerdy or whatever but I think this is very, very cool. Thousands of years before the world knew anything about laminin, Paul penned those words. And now we see that from a very LITERAL standpoint, we are held together, one cell to another, by the cross.

You would never in a quadrillion years convince me that is anything other than the mark of a Creator who knew EXACTLY what laminin “glue” would look like long before Adam breathed his first breath!