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Tomorrow's services - Everyone welcome to come along Keeping Trusting when God delays - 11am (Mark) Christ is Enough - 7pm (Mark) (Image © John Voo - sand-hourglass-black-and-white)

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New sermons up! Facing the end of life with Abraham - Genesis 25 Seeing God's Glory Living for God's glory and more...

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Come along this evening to hear Billy and Anne McMahon speaking about their recent trip to Rwanda. 7pm.

This week's article

This week's article Fearfully and Wonderfully made (January’s Verse) Each year some of the churches in Letterkenny and around about give out a calendar. The verse on the calendar for this month is from Psalm 139:14 which reads, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” Have you ever stopped to think about the human body? It is an incredible piece of design. From the moment of conception—how it grows and develops into this fully functioning masterpiece of flesh and bone—bones soft enough to flex in the birth process, but strong enough to provide structure and protection, that will eventually harden into something stronger than concrete. A dual oxygen extraction system—one which extracts it from the placenta’s enriched blood, the other from the surrounding air once born—and the switch over automatic as birth happens! Utterly incredible. Imagine setting designers the following specification for designing a pump: • 75 year life expectancy – 2,500,000,000 cycles • Requires no maintenance or lubrication • Output has to vary between 0.25 horsepower and 1 horsepower bursts • Not allowed to weigh more than 300 grams (10.5 oz) • Pumping capacity of 2000 gallons per day or 55 million gallons over 75 years • Valves operating 4000-5000 times per hour Yet that is what the human heart is! Think of designing a material which is elastic yet durable, waterproof yet breathable, heat reactive, sensitive in places, tough in others, self-repairing, with an inbuilt indicator display to show the health of body. Think of how your skin moves through a rainbow of colours to warn us of dangers—red for infection, yellow for jaundice, green when metabolic toxins are present, blue with lack of oxygen, white when anaemic—not to mention the various rashes or colouring produced by specific illnesses. The whole optical system fascinates me—from the lens, to the retina, to the optic nerve, to how the brain interprets images and builds a catalogue of imagery, depth perception, texture and distance measurement to enable us to make sense of what we see. I lost sight in one eye in my 20s and cannot play racquet sports anymore. It’s too fast and the depth perception isn’t there. But I have a friend who was born with sight in only one eye and his brain has reconfigured to measure depth and distance in other ways—he regularly plays squash, one of the fastest of racquet sports! Take it down to the cellular level—scientist Michael Denton writes: “If we imagine magnifying a cell until it is large enough to cover London or New York… you discover a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity… What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.” And there are 75 trillion of these cells in your body! Have a look at yourself and consider that you are an incredible piece of design. And then let that thought take you to the designer Himself.

Why are we here? Surely there is more to life than just this? What gives us purpose amidst suffering or disappointment? Why not come along this Sunday morning for the start of a new mini-series looking at the Bible's answer to these questions

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