Counting for Something

So what do you count for? It may not be good grammar but you get my point. To the world you are a Social Security number. To the State you are the number on the back of your car. I had a "number" during the last Selective Service draft. It was an important number: 305. It meant I "did not have to go to Vietnam."

I have two more numbers for you: 2,394,415, 296 and 498,836,520. No it is not anything to do with the National Debt. Unfortunately both of these numbers are far too small to even approximate what we owe.

The numbers are from the calculator found on health discovery.com. You put in your date of birth and you find our what "you count for." So the first number is my number of heartbeats since the time of my birth. The second number is the number of breaths I have taken.

You might want to stop now and see what you count for. Both of those numbers are really "what counts" not the number of dollars in your stock portfolio or what is left on your mortgage. Either of those numbers do not really matter if you don't have the first numbers.

I would imagine that no one reading this right now has as much money as either of the first two numbers mentioned. If you do we need to become really good friends before you take your next breath.

When I saw "my numbers" I almost lost my breath...nice turn of words, huh? I mean I have not been counting, have you? But someone has because those breaths and beats come from somewhere.

Psalm 139 says that the place from which the breath and beats come has this cosmic calculator. It seems we are "known" inside and out. Every aspect of our insides are known. There is a phrase in this Psalm that I love, "We are fearfully and wonderfully made." We are not put together on an assembly line nor or we ordered from some kind of "Lands End" catalogue. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

It may sound strange to say "fearfully" because we live in such a fear-filled world where terror lurks around corners but this is the kind of "fear" that means "wow...awesome...unbelievable." It is the kind of fear I felt when I looked at our first child just after she came out of the womb. There was joy mixed with...well...fear at what just happened.

We loose that fear and wonder don't we. We just go about our days beating and breathing as if it does not "count." Well, it counts to someone. Someone is doing the numbers. It all adds up.

So today I think I'll stop somewhere and listen to my heart and pay attention to my breath. If I do that perhaps I will pay more attention to all the breaths and hearts out there around me.

Part of the problem in our wonderful yet broken world is that we no longer see each other as fearfully and wonderfully made. That is why we can blow each other up in the name of the wrong kind of fear. We need to go back to the beginning where real fear and wonder come from.

It all counts...people count..."breathe in breathe out move on"....

Blessings
jody