Fearfully and WonderfullyНамуна

One and Many 

I remember the first time I saw a living cell under a microscope. I had snuck into a college lab early one morning with a teacup of brackish liquid I’d scooped from a pond. Bits of decomposing leaves were floating on top, emitting the musty odor of organic decay. 

No sooner had I touched one drop of pond water to a glass slide under the microscope than a universe sprang to life. Hundreds of organisms crowded into view: delicate, single-celled globes of crystal unfurling and flitting sideways, excited by the warmth of my microscope light. I edged the slide a bit, glancing past the more lively organisms. Ah, there it was: an amoeba. A mere chip of translucent blue, barely visible to my naked eye, it revealed its inner workings through the microscope. 

This simple, primordial creature performed all the basic functions of my human body. It breathed, digested, excreted, reproduced. In its own peculiar way it even moved, jutting a bit of itself forward and the rest following with a motion as effortless as a drop of oil spreading on a table. After one or two hours of such activity, the grainy, liquid blob would travel a third of an inch. Though in appearance a meager bit of gel, the amoeba manifested life, which differs profoundly from mere matter. That busy, throbbing drop of water gave me a lasting image of the jungle of life and death we share, and beckoned me to further explore living cells. 

Each day we live at the mercy of organisms one-trillionth our size. A drop of water may contain as many bacteria as there are humans on earth. Bacteria enshroud my body: when I wash my hands, I sluice five million of them from the folds of my skin. Immunologists share a little joke that they cite when asked how the body can possibly prepare every type of antibody required in our perilous world: GOD, they reply—an acronym for “generator of diversity.” 

I believe these diverse cells in my body can also teach me about larger organisms: families, groups, communities, villages, nations—and especially about the community that is likened to a body more than thirty times in the New Testament. I speak of that network of people scattered across the planet who have little in common other than their membership in the Body that follows Jesus Christ.