Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Psalm 51:10 (NIV)
The heart pumps about one million barrels of blood during an average lifetime—enough to fill more than three supertankers.
Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze. You're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body. Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard—twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.
Put your hand on your heart. Did you place your hand on the left side of your chest? Many people do, but the heart is actually located almost in the center of the chest, between the lungs. It's tipped slightly so that a part of it sticks out and taps against the left side of the chest, which is what makes it seem as though it is located there.
Your body has about six quarts of blood. These six quarts of blood circulate through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 12,000 miles—that's four times the distance across the United States from coast to coast.
The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand, are so small that it takes 10 of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.
Source: pbs.org/wgbh/nova/eheart/facts.html
The average adult human heart is about the size of a large man’s closed fist and weighs about 11 ounces. This relatively small mass of special cardiac muscle, nerves, coronary vessels, smooth interior lining and valves beats an average of 60–80 times per minute without our even thinking about it. This amounts to more than 100,000 heartbeats per day.
Source: funtrivia.com
GLEANERonline.org
Have You Noticed?
On some of the news pages there's a little icon that looks like a tab.
That means that the GLEANER editors received more stories than would fit into the print edition of the GLEANER, so some were directed immediately to the online edition of the GLEANER rather than holding them for another month. We look forward to having more and more stories in the online edition as more people share what's happening in their churches. We hope it will become a resource of great ideas churches share with each other—stories of community outreach and nuture of members; stories about church groups going on short-term mission trips (with lots of photos)—anything that might be of interest to a wide audience.
Check it out!
