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A Single Cell: By Jordan Bennett

3rd Place Winner for Inspiring Learning Contest 2024

I used to think that a cell was pretty simple. A cell has a round nucleus, a least one red bean with squiggly lines inside it called a mitochondrion, and four or five other organelles spaced out inside the cell. I also used to have a pretty simple, albeit demanding, concept of who God was. God was a harsh judge that was acutely aware of each of my sins. I am now approaching the end of a four-year journey spent studying cells and my views on cells and God have changed quite a bit. I’ve learned that cells are much more crowded than I once thought. I’ve been repeatedly overwhelmed at how much there is to learn about even just one cell in the human body. Paradoxically, learning about the layers and layers of complexity contained inside a single human cell has somehow made God’s true character much clearer to me.

Each of us started from a single cell. That cell was quite large, at least for a cell. In a small corner of the cell, the nucleus, was contained some information on what the cell should do, half of it from mom, half of it from dad. Everything else in this big, first cell was from mom. The cell divided into two identical cells, then four, and so on. Eventually, the first big cell divided enough to become trillions of cells of all different shapes and sizes! This conglomeration of trillions of cells somehow laughs and cries and learns and hiccups – it’s me. And it’s you. Somehow at the right time and place, one of those first identical cells knew to start becoming different so that me and you would have what we need. Some groups of cells started to become a brain, a heart, toes, eyeballs, and a tongue. Those things seem simple now too. A brain thinks, a heart pumps blood, a tongue licks. But how? How did one big cell become millions of cells that form muscles which move at my unspoken command? How are these millions of cells communicating to keep my heart constantly beating at a steady pace, but change pace if I’m running, or sleeping, or anxious, or at a high altitude?

Well, I couldn’t tell you. At least not exactly. I’ve learned a lot in the past four years, but I still feel that I’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to understanding even a single cell. I can tell you that if I were to learn absolutely everything there was to know about a single cell – the biology, the biochemistry, the physics, the quantum physics - I would likely require a few lifetimes to learn it all. Maybe a few more lifetimes to learn how millions of cells communicate to form a functioning brain. In some ways, the human body is more vast than the universe itself. Yet, someone took the time to create my body and yours. That Creator is God. If God took all the lifetimes it must have taken to create something so complex and beautiful and then gift it to me and to you, how much must He care about me, and about you?

A single cell has taught me that God loves me very much. If God was so involved and careful when He made me, He must be very involved in my life and guiding me through it. God’s work is to save us, even His greatest creations.